Overwhelming beginners with more than they can chew is not the best way to welcome them to Linux, giving them the chance to learn a bit at a time is instead.

Beginners need to learn anyways, why not skip the “not-for-beginners stuff” and go all in?

Because most people will likely want something that works out of the box so they can learn over time

I tried a couple distros on VMs (mint xfce, Manjaro i3…) because I want to eventually resurrect my old laptop and I was trying stuff out.

Tried installing Arch in another VM this year. The regular instructions were complicated and I didn’t follow them because too much work. Tried using arch installer and couldn’t. Had to install arch installer (???) from the boot command line. But it gave me a keyring error as well. Idk how I solved that but eventually got through.

Then I had it functioning for some days. One day I try to turn the VM back on and it just doesn’t boot. I’m sorry arch, I love you but it wasn’t meant to be.