I grew tired of shitty “Top 10 Linux distros in ${CURRENT_YEAR}” articles so I wrote a blogpost, that I would personally consider helpful when I was starting out, so I can simply link it to people when they ask my opinion on a beginner distro.
Objective criticism is welcome and encouraged.
Archinstall is great but also the wiki itself recommends manual install and I still think for someone who never touched Linux Calamares would be better.
You’re probably right there. To me, Arch really seems like an endgame distro, for when you’ve tried enough options to know what you like and you just want to roll that without any cruft.