I installed EOS XFCE on a Dell mini box last night, as I was looking around for fresh ideas to deal with the annoyance of age verification. Before I go any further, is AV taboo on this forum because it is considered political? Anyway, the install went OK - I added my killer apps which are Mullvad and VirtualBox, both of which work fine, along with Rawtherapee. The fly in the ointment was vlc - which took over an hour of struggle and despair to get working, and then more time to make video thumbnails appear. After always having an easy ride previously installing vlc on Debian-based distros, this was really frustrating and almost had me walking away from EOS. But everything so far seems to be working well, albeit having to begin scrambling painfully up the learning curve of Arch. Thank you to the devs for what I hope will be an interesting journey with EOS. Sadly with AV everything is up in the air right now, and many people will be thrashing around different distros and ways of using Linux.
The vlc split packages is a rather recent change in arch. They normally don’t split packages so much.
Based on what i read about age verification on my last visit a few days ago, the forum moderators seem to be locking/closing any thread that goes off the rails. Some have said that it is too political, while others have mentioned that they’re still figuring things out as it is still being debated everyhwere.
For what its worth, i saw that Meta/facebook is also integrating their services with age verification. Not a surprise of course, but this many companies jumping on it this fast seem that its meant to stay.
Anyways
Welcome to Arch 
I’ve been distrohopping from Cachy OS, Omarchy OS and Endeavor OS and decided to stick with Endeavor OS a few months ago. Its been treating me well.
I did also bump into that VLC issue myself, seems i just had to install an encoder for some reason. Genuinly, once you get used to how things work around here - its a blessing. KDE here though, enjoy your stay 
Some have said that it is too political, while others have mentioned that they’re still figuring things out as it is still being debated everyhwere.
@lyricism, there’s no conspiracy here, no need to start stirring things up. Not a single one of devs of ANY distros know currently what this situation actually means for them and how it should be answered or made possible or even if it’s possible.
But enough of that subject. @greenwhale, welcome to the Purple side! Hope you like your stay! 
@greenwhale Welcome!
If you haven’t seen yet it’s Meta/Facebook been the ones pouring money into lobbying for this, I’ll keep it at that. Just check Reddit or Youtube about it and you will find it.
@greenwhale Welcome to the forum! 
@greenwhale
Don’t be afraid of Arch. Jump right into middle of the purple sunshine and you’ll be right at home. EOS is as direct to Arch as it gets. The only difference getting there is the path you follow. 
Welcome @greenwhale - sorry to read about the problems with VLC. But good to read you’ve got it all stored.
Have fun with EOS.
Welcome to the community @greenwhale 
I’m glad to hear you stuck with it and got VLC working. As mentioned, the VLC package was split up recently, so you could be quite selective about what codecs to install. If you’d prefer the it-just-plays-everything approach, simply install vlc-plugins-all, and you’ll be covered.
yay -Syu vlc-plugins-all
I use RawTherapee a lot too, although I personally prefer to build the -git version with a number of optimisations turned on.
eos is not exactly the best age verification free distro candidate. the maintainers have said they cant comply, but have also said law is law, and of course like all arch based distros except for artix they use systemd, which just implemented age verification capability. i love eos just not sure it’s gonna be what you’re looking for in the end unless the maintainers have more of a concrete plan for this
Please stop spreading FUD. A birthdate field does NOT imply, or even suggest, mandatory age verification. The description field in /etc/passwd could just as easily be used to store birthdates.