tl;dr Title
It’s common knowledge at this point that Arch has a reputation for being very difficult to use which led to it becoming a meme ( like everything else on the internet). Even tho Arch users swear that it is actually trivial to install and use for someone who is willing to read documentation, it is also known that distributions with significantly higher requirements on overall *nix knowledge like Gentoo, Oasis, KISS and Crux (?) exist. So my question is this: was Arch used to be harder to install and use? Because I heard bad things about Debian’s installation process too, even tho it is incredibly easy now. I also hear Ubuntu being bad for user privacy, even tho that whole Amazon thing happened years ago under a completely different management. Things move fast in Linux family’s world, was Arch a very different system back in 2006?
I think, it’s a result of the Dunning-Kruger-Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect
Someone who’s installed a normal end-user distro has no reason to be confident.
Someone who’s installed Gentoo and the like has all the reasons to be confident, but recognizes how much there is still to learn, and that they really know nothing in comparison, so they don’t brag about it.
Someone who’s installed Arch has made that first step towards knowledge, so they can be more confident than a complete noob, but they haven’t yet realized that there is still so much more out there, so they feel like they’ve conquered the world and completely overshoot in how confident they should be.
And I guess, there’s also the quantity factor. There’s just a lot less people who (manage to) install Gentoo et al, so less people who could brag about it.