Like others have said Arch is not as intimidating as it would appear to be. Over the last couple of years, they improved IHMO the most difficult process for the average user of installing Arch. You now just run archinstall Then follow the system prompts. It’s constantly being improved. If you do go with Arch, aside from using Pacman to install apps, you can use “Yay” or “Paru” or others which pull from the vast AUR repository.

I used Arch for a few years and recently moved over to Aurora Linux (Immutable KDE distro adapted from Fedora’s CoreOS and uBlueOS which is an offshoot of CoreOS) Specifically, I use the Developer experience of Aurora which gives you a VSCode type of editor as well as Podman desktop included as well as other items. It’s meant for those who wish to develop and not have to worry about keeping the system up to date. It runs updates in the background and rebooting your system will run the updates.

The reason I left Arch was simple, I used to like to live on the edge of software as well, until it took one too many hastily released updates which borked my Arch system. My home PC has morphed from being my dedicated computer to my wife’s and my computer which is fine, but I’d like to keep it available for her avoiding the need to do a repair because an update broke it.

Keep an eye out for the KDE Linux OS which they have in development and not yet for use, but is earmarked for being the official immutable OS for KDE which will receive their bleeding edge updates. https://linuxiac.com/kde-announced-its-kde-linux-distro/ https://community.kde.org/KDE_Linux

I plan on migrating to that once it’s finished. :) I’ve become a fan of immutable OS’s because they allow you to roll back if something should go wrong. Which it rarely does :)

Yes. I have a network server for my printer and works. Also a label printer hooked up via USB. Also USB SSD and other drives. You should not see any problems.

I came from Arch to Fedora as well but using Universal Blue’s images. In my case, Aurora (KDE), and daughter’s Bluefin (Gnome). They update in the background and only install when you reboot. So far, most of the newer software releases such as web browsers or the desktop environment fall within a day or two for being installed which is a nice alternative. The big plus I see on these too is they are immutable so if something installs or breaks, you just boot into the previous version from Grub and go from there.

Additionally, OpenSuse MicroOS has options for whatever environment you are used to such as Gnome or KDE, this is immutable as well. I view all of these as “Set and Forget”.