Small sample set aside, the performance differences here are much bigger than I've seen in previous linux comparisons. Something has to be off right? Curious if anyone is able to reproduce these results.
Well, the FreeBSD and OpenBSD was more of a joke :) but, a normie just expects things to be very Windowsish, and when it’s not and even simpler, they’re getting lost for no real reason. It’s just different to what they’re used to. However, I’ve seen people not familiar with Windows well enough handling Unix-y interfaces okayish.
To me, installing Arch is just very easy, as I’ve done it many times, and use the system for close to decade soon. It’s formatting your disks, adding that to a config — /etc/fstab — which is done with a simple command. Then you mount that disk of yours, pacstrap there (which means installing basic packages), chroot there, and do some more settings like setting locale and a hostname (and I guess missing to do it won’t brick anything, so you can skip or forget), perhaps something else you need to setup anyway, like creating a user. Install a bootloader, reboot. Done.
FreeBSD is simple, but to me it’s not that simple, as its installation process is next next next, I don’t even remember how I installed it. Under the hood, I guess that’s all the same.
By the way, I thought it’s worth mentioning it’s obvious that next next next approach is simpler to anyone. It’s that Arch’s way is simpler to someone who needs more control for some reason, or install these things often enough to justify that approach. It’s wrong that Arch has this vibe of ‘too difficult to even install.’ It’s not that difficult. What is is to know what you need to install and why. That takes years of using that system, so at first you follow some guide not really understanding what you’re doing.