EndeavourOS is probaby your best bet - it’s basically Arch with training wheels that doesn’t mess with the core repos like Manjaro does, and the community is super helpful for newbies who are stil learning.

Any of them that use the Arch repos directly are probably fine. Don’t use Manjaro.

I will say that Arch does now have a guided installer, so you don’t need to do everything manually. Here’s the wiki page for it: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall

btw I use arch

Endeavour OS. It’s solid.

I don’t recommend Manjaro. Its delayed release but no testing methodology has caused me grief a number of times. I still run a VM with it on it, but the only VM OS that has had more issues was windows

Edit it’s /its

Arch. No I’m not being a troll or suggesting something bad.

The reason I suggest Arch by itself is because of ArchInstall script. From there, it’s simple to use.

Learn to use pacman, and maybe an AUR Helper like Paru or Yay.

Arch Wiki is quite robust.

EndeavourOS is great.

EndeavourOS and nothing else. I personally use Cachy but it’s way too unstable for a beginner.

Expect a bunch of people in comments who will deliberately recommend default Arch instead of answering your question.

I’ve been using EndeavourOS for a few years now, and haven’t had any problems with it.

why do you want it to be arch based in particular? the entire point of an arch based distro is that you’re rawdogging it.

if you want something simple, use something Ubuntu/debian based. if you want something more complex, just try arch, it’s not that hard

Expect a bunch of people in comments who will deliberately recommend default Arch

Arch

Any of them that use the Arch repos directly are probably fine. Don’t use Manjaro.

Manjaro or Endeavour.

Just base arch

Garuda

Steamos

Artix + OpenRC

CachyOS

EndeavourOS and nothing else.

I suppose that pretty much covers the full gamut.

EDIT: Here’s the Linux distro family tree:

https://github.com/FabioLolix/LinuxTimeline/releases

It lists 19 still-living Arch-based distros. Disregarding category-based recommendations and looking only at explicitly-named recommendations, as of this writing, you’ve explicitly been recommended 7 so far, or over a third of what exist. :-)

None other than base Arch.

If you don’t know enough about Linux, that’s the point, installing Arch will teach you. Manually, not with archinstall.

Archinstall if you’re brave, endeavor if you aren’t.

Although if you don’t want to rawdog it, I’d recommend fedora or tumbleweed instead. The whole point of arch is that it’s simple to keep everything on your head.

Steamos.

Fight me.

Just base arch

CachyOS.

Manjaro or Endeavour. I have and appreciate immensly both of them, and a slight preference for Manjaro due its release cycle.