EOS is permanently in second place on the DW page hit list

Yes.

Arch has been a technically excellent distribution for many years now, but it’s not as accessible to new users as pre-configured distributions.

EnOS provides easy onboarding to a working Arch-based installation with the minimal amount of additional fuss. There are other approaches that give you a more “vanilla” Arch (archinstall, archfi, etc.) but having a graphical installation environment makes things look easier to new users, and providing a sensible set of defaults means they can’t be confused by the various options. (Ever read the Bootloader page on the Arch wiki?)

Making an excellent distribution easier to access means more people use it, and the more people who use it the more bugs and issues that are found and fixed.

Ubuntu was originally teased as “Ubuntu means I can’t configure Debian”; many Arch derivatives are the same. But whereas Ubuntu diverged significantly from Debian, the big difference with close Arch derivatives is that they are actually close, so issues can be replicated, reported, and fixed in Arch. Derivatives get the early new users, Arch gets to focus on doing its thing (but picking up more experienced users over time as/when they realise they don’t need a graphical installer any more and migrate to “Arch proper”).

This means there’s a nice virtuous circle of improvement, where different parts of the ecosystem are working in concert to improve things for everyone. For example, dalto’s excellent btrfs-assistant that was developed as a result of (and as a replacement for) Garuda’s inclusion of Timeshift for BTRFS snapshots.

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