Arch is aimed at people who know their shit so they can build their own distro based on how they imagine their distro to be. It is not a good distro for beginners and non power users, no matter how often you try to make your own repository, and how many GUI installers you make for it. There's a good reason why there is no GUI installer in arch (aside from being able to load it into ram). That being that to use Arch, you need to have a basic understanding of the terminal. It is in no way hard to boot arch and type in archinstall. However, if you don't even know how to do that, your experience in whatever distro, no matter how arch based it is or not, will only last until you have a dependency error or some utter and total Arch bullshit® happens on your system and you have to run to the forums because you don't understand how a wiki works.
You want a bleeding edge distro? Use goddamn Opensuse Tumbleweed for all I care, it is on par with arch, and it has none of the arch stuff.
You have this one package that is only available on arch repos? Use goddamn flatpak and stop crying about flatpak being bloated, you probably don't even know what bloat means if you can't set up arch. And no, it dosent run worse. Those 0,0001 seconds don't matter.
You really want arch so you can be cool? Read the goddamn 50 page install guide and set it up, then we'll talk about those arch forks.
(Also, most arch forks that don't use arch repos break the aur, so you don't even have the one thing you want from arch)
If your distro can't be forked into a "beginner distro" then it's fundamentally flawed IMHO.
To be clear, I've used Arch as my daily drivers for a while, and while it's not the best fit for my needs (I use Debian mostly), there's nothing that I experienced that was incompatible with a "beginner" distro.
Arch can be forked into a beginner distro, just look at SteamOS, but one of the major advantages of Arch is the AUR and to be able to use it you have to have packages in the same (or similar) enough version to Arch, and THAT is not beginner friendly. But having an Arch fork that can't access the AUR loses most of the reason people would want to use Arch, so you end up with distros aimed at beginners that are also running bleeding edge packages which is a recipe for disaster.
Cachyos can access aur? Thats what Paru is for? I could be mistaken, still very nee
I'm sure you could make a "beginner" Gentoo distro but it's really so counter to its purpose I don't see it happening.
(something something ChromeOS)
Haha yeah that was the counter example I was thinking of. I agree completely
you could make a Gentoo from source beginner distro, and I think you could make it reasonably "idiot proof," but it would still be a bad user experience most likely (too much time spent compiling).