Why do people say arch derivatives are not for beginners?

[RissViss]

The reason Ubuntu/Debian/Mint are considered beginner friendly is because the packages are tested as long as you stay in the official repositories. On Arch and other rolling release style distros, bugs and regressions can and will happen.

This my point of view and how I see things. At the end I will get to a point.

This is the problem I had with Ubuntu and Mint, is how are you suggesting to install packages on these OS.

1. Terminal commands. Learning all the aptget and all the miss types you can get in a long command. After making to many mistakes and then either giving up or breaking the OS, or resorting to copy and paste from the internet. Someone coming from a windows environment to Linux and having to do installs from Terminal is not fun nor easy. My first time with terminal was not fun.
2. Ubuntu / Mint package manager is not easy to get use to or figure out, compared to Manjaro I watched a review of Manjaro and it was easy, go on internet find names of programs and type them in the search, list appears click one. I did not find Ubuntu easy, still could not be bothered to figure it out to this day.
3. Then you have the Ubuntu store kind of program look through all the programs and click install.
   for the most part it works, until you need a program that is not on the store page, then see step 1 and 2.

My opinion is that, for me Manjaro is easy to use, yes it will break and need fixing, but then you have a better package manager and pacman commands are short and easy to remember, no need to copy and paste. And if you need help there is this forum and the manjaro forums to help you with the fix.
I have been installing different linux distros since 1995 - Now every two years starting with red hat then ubuntu then mint, and now I use Manjaro, did not stick with red hat or any debian based Linux.
The reason I say a Linux OS like Manjaro is a beginners OS is, maybe someone will be like me and say wow this is a useful OS and is worth the problems that come with that OS.
My beginner and anyone else’s beginner is different, and when people suggest an OS they should include Manjaro so people then can deside for themselves what there beginner linux OS is.

The good and the bad of linux is there is many different types, and like linux there are many different types of people. It just means people have to spend a little time and find out what works for them.
Manjaro for a Arch type OS is I think the easiest to learn.

[thro]

Yup.

We’re not in the early linux days any more, where you might want to run pre-release or unstable kernels for must have features. Sure, you might be a tweaker and have a curiosity to satisfy, but that’s different.

I remember compiling new pre-release kernels or different trees to get things like sound card support, SMP, etc. but all those features are normally available in the kernels available in your distribution these days. Unless you happen to have some very new hardware - it’s just not really needed these days.

Ditto for the desktop UI. I remember compiling KDE pre-1.0 (and all the dependancies, on slackware) and putting up with all manner of BS because the project showed so much promise. Every new version brought “wow” features. Now? Who knows or even cares what the difference is between KDE (or Gnome, etc.) point releases? Sure there are probably bugfixes but there aren’t any show-stoppers in general at this point any more.

The platform is, at this stage, fairly mature.

[thro]

I think this :

I’ve come across “should work” more than once in there. I understand they can’t test every hardware ever, but I would think they would be more receptive of questions.

Sums up why i don’t suggest newbies head straight for distros like arch or gentoo or whatever.

The linux (and open source in general) documentation in general, is a shit-show. Its very often out of date or outright incorrect. Because someone figured out how to get something working and wrote how they did it - which may or may not be the right way or even a good way to do it. Or something changed this week and it no longer applies.

Especially for rolling release because there is a lot of change, and very often the documentation simply doesn’t keep up.

Which is fine if you understand a bit and have time and effort to figure it out. But you need to know what you’re getting yourself into, and be prepared to deal with that.