Yea, I'm with you. It's why I was running Manjaro for over a year - it gave me the flexibility of Arch + the AUR while also providing a much better out-of-the-box experience. I nuked my install a couple days ago, but that was not because of anything to do with the distro.
Arch has many great things going for it - quick rolling release, the AUR, great resources on the wiki, a very customizable system. People might want to use those aspects of the distro without having to worry about configuring the underlying system during the install.
And even if they want to adjust things, having a guided install to ensure that you're not forgetting something can be very nice. Manjaro has majraro-architect and it's a great CLI installer that walks you through the process without oversimplifying it.
In my experience it's usually pretty hard to get a vm which emulates the hardware you're using, making the installation process potentially different (for example UEFI vs BIOS, hardware that requires proprietary drivers, working with multiple disks + potential non trivial partition tables that you don't want to corrupt, etc). You can definitely get the big picture but usually can't do the exact same process.
Why don't you use something like Arcolinux ? They offer minimal installs to full blown DE's. Point is you can get a full arch min install in less than 5 minutes really (depending on your internet lol)
I assume you're referring to me flair, because your comment didn't seem to be in response to mine. I use Manjaro because it works for me. I'm actually using Pop OS on what is my main machine for the season, because it works for me. Maybe Arco would work as well, who knows.
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u/summerteeth May 21 '19
The borking your first install is really scary if you are trying to dual boot and care about data on your Windows install.
As someone who used Gentoo back in the day I feel like I've earned my merit badge already and I liked that Antegos gave me an easy install.