Alt text: A line plot with 2 axis (confidence vs competence) referencing the Dunning-Kruger effect with various distro logos placed at different points on the line. Starts with mint/ubuntu near (0,0) and progressing through multiple distros to end up with opensuse/fedora at what it calls “the plateau of sustainability”
What Toot said.
Things I would emphasize are:
The community “critical mass” is amazing with the wiki, online posts and such. You get a lot of support that isn’t ancient, jank and ad hoc like Ubuntu.
Arch emphasizes paying attention. It’s not a hands free OS: you have know what graphics drivers you run, and what your desktop environment is. When you update, you have to watch the log for emergency messages and such, including official notifications from the arch repos themself. It’s not a “hands off” OS where you can operate without knowing anything about it, but the reward is that shit gets fixed quick, officially, without having to stray from defaults and break your system, or accumulating a bunch of hacks you have to maintain yourself.
Much of Arch’s bad reputation comes from AUR. Don’t use anything from the AUR (instead of an official repo package) unless you absolutely have to. This is when stuff starts breaking. Installing standalone apps that aren’t on the repo via AUR is fine, but to be clear, avoid things that integrate with the system if you can.
It doesn’t have to be hardcore barebones like Gentoo, there are all sorts of Preconfigurations like Garuda and Endeavor. I recommend CachyOS (which I have kept for two years now, and will into the future).