Arch does tend to keep packages as close to upstream as possible, which can be both a good and bad thing. Sway not binding to graphical-session.target by default is a little strange for example. Other distros also save a first-time user a great deal of configuration for things they probably don’t care about as well. Going through Fedora’s install and finding out that disk encryption and SELinux were configured OOTB was very nice to see personally. On the other hand Arch’s installation (w/o archinstall) has you choosing a bootloader, audio server, display manager, etc. Nothing arduous and I like it, but definitely not for everyone

This is all eliminated by spinoffs of course, but even there users have the option to run random scripts/AUR packages without vetting them. Also doesn’t help that the most popular Arch-based distro for a while (Manjaro) was pretty flaky and generally incompatible with the AUR (despite saying otherwise), leading to many people saying “that’s just Arch” and swearing off the parent project as well

I switched to (Doom)-Emacs from a ~7yr old homegrown Vim config last week and honestly the configuration is less bad than it seems. If you’re mainly writing markdown you’ll probably get 99% of the way there by just enabling the dedicated module

Additionally if you’re looking for it to start on boot without logging in, you might find the loginctl enable-linger command to be of use. Maybe along with a Restart=on-failure policy in the service file if this is for a headless unit or something

If it’s an external SSD I could see it being useful in order to keep native compatibility with Windows and MacOS (IIRC their other option would be FAT32 but I don’t use a Windows machine so who knows)