I don’t consider myself a geek either, even though I tried some distro.
You may want to try Debian. There is the Arch way and the Debian way.
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I’m not even saying that because i don’t have that much knowledge with the command line. I’m just saying some things are difficult to do and understand with hardware and getting things to work. But definitely the more command line you understand the better. I only know what i know and isn’t much. It makes me understand how little i know. So i always got room for improvement. 
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Using Linux is eternal self-development.
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nevermind 
my first distro was sled and opensuse… but is always with distro’s, a good distro progression you move to the distro you like finaly.
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I think that I’d say intermediate because there’s no clear path into package management from a gui. I think that’s a definite requirement for a beginner distro.
This definitely pushes you to the command line.
Also I definitely needed the help of some kind users in order to get over some initial hurdles.
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Depending on the DE, you could even put EOS as beginner
The installer is very easy to use and the distro has everything a beginner needs to get going except for a GUI package manager, but with KDE is has the native app “Discover”
Even just using Pacman and remembering a few short commands should be easy for a beginner. They can just bookmark the Arch packages website and search for the names
I’d say it’s beginner friendly on KDE and probably intermediate on some other DEs
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You’re all totally right in what you’re saying.
But exactly that approach prevented Linux for a long time to get a bigger share on Desktops (leaving the question, if that should be the intension or is to be desired, aside).
People have been and, to a certain extend, still are afraid or at least feel uncomfortable using a terminal. They want to have the choice to do it and do not want to get forced to do it.
Linux users for a long time said, that people have the choice to either get along with a terminal and use Linux or stay with Windows and MacOS. But that is, at least according to my experience, not what they wanted to have. They wanted to use Linux and, with that OS, the choice either to use a terminal or accomplish things using a GUI. In the end that is exactly what Linux is about : Offering choices.
We really do have a consens that the terminal is very important for many things. I learned, that the slower approach is much more appreciated by beginners. At least for most of them.
In German we have a saying :
Die Ausnahme bestätigt die Regel.
literally translated :
The exception proves the rule.
I wonder if you have a GUI package manager if you need to use the terminal at all in EOS, after install.
I can’t really tell because I rely on the terminal for my development work, but I’m curious if the typical browsing, office editing and media consuming user would need to ever touch the terminal.
Thinking back to when I was a ‘beginner’, a GUI might have helped a bit. I came from knowing a few things from Multics ( A multi-user time-sharing system) and lots of experience with C64 (what’s a gui? you lived in a BASIC interpreter) and Amiga (which had a good gui and great terminal). I would say the barrier in Linux isn’t so much that is a terminal-centric system, as the downright WEIRDNESS of that terminal!
The mix of terse commands, and overly long ones is intimidating - as are the differences from the ‘norm’ in other CLIs. ls is fine, cd is fine, but mkdir instead of md? rmdir instead of rd? Not too consistent! The oddities in bash, too are legion - not to mention the ‘rules’ of regular expressions. THAT, I feel is the real barrier.
All that given, though, I was helped a LOT by the early Ubuntu forums and the copy/paste terminal-based help they provided - generously - in my early days of returning to Linux. Given useful support of that kind (and with today’s generosity with gui screenshots), most of us can end up here I’d give it an intermediate - because of this forum - despite Arch earning it’s Expert!
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In case the system is running and there are no problems, most likely not. But I don’t see, why that should be looked at as being negative. The opposite. So people can use their OS for whatever they want to do without having to deal with things they don’t want to and which just consume time (in their point of view).
Clicking here, clicking there, watching adult stuff on the internet, writing a letter to their secret love and so on.
Exactly this is what made the other OSs so extremely successful.
Linux nowadays offers you nearly the same simplicity. But in addition to that you can dig very deep if you want to or if you need to. These things combined make Linux even more awesome than it already used to be in earlier days.
Some less trivial, but still common tasks like changing the default wm of your DE, adding another kernel, downgrading packages and so on still require some terminal use. But for the most part everyone can choose whether they are comfortable with it or not, especially while using a Desktop Environment providing a way to do a lot of things via a GUI. Overall, in a distro like Endeavour some familiarity with command line is required a bit more than in other distros I believe, because it’s so close to Arch.
Judging by the use that others make of Linux systems I have installed and setup for them, probably not. Most of them are on 'buntus - and Gnome covers it all. I don’t see it being any harder to run an EOS system, especially with a couple of @manuel’s scripts being handy for updating! Typical use is browsing, email, and music (maybe with a side of torrents?) - oh - and casting to the TV/Stereo system in a couple of cases! So far the calls to fix things have been rare (twice in 4 years) and usually concern hardware…
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Oh come on, once it’s properly set up, even pure Arch is (most of the time) easy to run effortlessly and without terminal. The self image of the Arch Master Race thinking themselves being really advanced users, sometimes cascades downstream. 
A lot of you people ARE advanced users, and then some, witch I admire, but new users can with some help run EOS without any trouble. It does more come down to what kind of user they are. If all they want is to surf the web, e-mailing, do some writing, listen to music and watching an occasional movie, they won’t mess about with the system - I know that’s a strange concept but some people are like that - and blow the system to smithereens.
I gave my then 86 year old mother one of my old laptops running Antergos KDE, witch she kept updated and it all went well until the computer decided to die. ONCE in that time there was a “manual intervention”, but that was solved with a phone call, and a text/sms.
She then bought a Windows computer, and she was not happy as she couldn’t find her way around it, and there was a lot of support calls coming in at my end of the line.
So it depends on the user to a great extent what might be considered beginner, intermediate, or advanced.
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If you are taking care yourself of an Arch system you should be ready to learn how to chroot into it and fix problems from the command line. The question is not whether it will break or not, but when it will do it, that’s what I heard
I also think the EOS is an intermediate distribution.
KDE is most similar to Windows among Linux desktops.
So there IS a reason I don’t like it??
I dared to switch to MacOs precisely because I already had knowledge of using the command line on Linux.
We have the same saying in Hungarian. A kivétel erősíti a szabályt.
The proliferation of Linux distributions is also the reason why Linux desktops do not have a larger share, although this number has increased recently.