Story time.
I learned Debian-based distros back in high school from a college tech class. After leaving school and getting my first job, I built my first computer (after two DOA boards and much gnashing of teeth). I sat happily in my Windows bubble for a long time.
Years later I had a catastrophic failure when trying to get clever and unlocking my system32 folder to do some tinkering. I’d had enough of Windows. Thought Pop! OS looked really nice.
But we sometimes have that one friend. Arch. Every time I talked about my OS or showed him my clean setup, Arch. If I had a problem with packages. Pacman. AUR. Arch.
I was going nuts. Did he care I was running Pop! OS with KDE Plasma using Kubuntu backports to jury rig a later version? No. Arch.
After a long and grueling battle, after slogging through mountains of unsolicited Arch memes in my DMs, after vehemently defending Debian, I will only say this:
I use Arch, btw.
It didn’t affect me, due to using startallback. It replaces start menu, taskbar and explorer. So my start menu is Win7 and my task and explorer are Win10.
It used to have a 100 day all access free trial and was 5 bucks, but I haven’t checked lately. I gotta keep a Windows machine around for art. My Gaomon tablet was able to use wacom drivers on Linux with some terminal tinkering, but it couldn’t map the scroll wheel by design, which was a deal breaker.