I love Arch, personally. Have been using it for quite a few years now and love the rolling release paradigm.

That said, I'm looking at setting up a desktop machine for my Dad, and seriously considering using Kubuntu 16.04.1 LTS[1]. He just wants to "use the damn thing" and I think that provides a much better ongoing maintenance story for machines that are less "pets" and more "tools".

[1] Yes, I much prefer KDE to GNOME. Can we all just get along?

Amen, ubuntu was horrible experience, I mean I loved it as I love linux over windows, but it kept crashing on me, and having issues, and too much bloat. I tend to run thin w/ i3 instead of a more graphical desktop environment anyhow. So Antergos (arch) was a much better choice and it's also very beautiful and runs a lot smoother.

Any downvoters care to explain why lettergram's Arch recommendations are both greyed out? His/her comments appear substantive & germane, what gives?

I didn't downvote, but there's a negative perception around Arch users kinda like vegans/vim-users/emacs-users, a la "how can tell if someone uses Arch? They'll tell you, over and over again."

The comment in question here is not at all guilty of this sort of "air of superiority" that bugs people, but it may be an oversensitivity caused by that perception.

I think they were the result of the weird groupthink that Ubuntu (or Mint for the really non-technical) is the only Linux that is usable for non-power users. If you recommend anything else, they think you're insane.

It's likely more than that. Arch generally is viewed as an "extreme" distro, since you have to manually setup everything.

Nothing wrong with that, but generally that's not a linux newbie distro.

Yeah, I don't care much about the up / down vote on a comment.

I did want to address setting up the distro so people have a general idea when reading the comments. It is pretty hard the first time around. Having set up Arch 5 or 6 times over the last few years, it takes me 20 minutes. My friend has his up in 5 - 10; it's really easy to deploy once you know how a computer system works. I don't think it's extreme for developers, and honestly it has one of the better documention and like I said, having tried many distros Arch is usually one of the most up-to-date and stable. I run it on my home computer with GNOME and my wife doesn't even know the distro, and she zips around, watches movies, plays music, uses Google Drive or Libre, etc.

No, I completely agree with you, and happen to have a fond spot for Arch myself.

Just wanted to point out that Arch does indeed intimidate most linux newbies. Most "regular" folks expect to install an OS and have everything "just work". They get this from Ubuntu, Fedora, etc... but with Arch, they get a terminal screen and a mounds of documentation.

Once setup with a windowing environment, most folks will settle in just fine. It's getting to that point that's the challenge.

Thanks all for the explanations.