Not the kind of simple you want, but the kind of simple you deserve

Arch is simple, but not easy.
Other distros might be easy, but not simple

Language is beautiful.
- But not simple. Or easy...
- ...beautiful is language.

I mean, have you seen archinstall? its pretty easy and straightforward. Unless you have a phobia against terminal screens.

At this point it's easier / more comfortable than a windows install. No waiting between steps, no unnecessary options, easier disk layouts.
- sometimes you can't even install windows without manually putting drivers on the install media

You'd like to think people just do this to assholes, but the number of innocent noobs that get recommended Arch is too damn high.

of innocent noobs

Don't know about you, but I only recommend arch when someone says they want the most costumisable distro. No matter if they just mean the DE, if they are too dumb to realise the difference between a DE and a distro, they shouldn't be on Linux anyway.
- That's not a matter of being dumb, just that they never had a reason to question the difference. The proper way to answer that if you think there might be confusion is to recommend arch and note that they might just care about the DE, in which case there are simpler options. Otherwise you're just being an ass.
- Recommending someone Arch who is a newbie is just dirty. At least recommended EndeavourOS or something.
Valve over here puttin' everybody on Arch

For some reason archinstall never worked for me. EndeavourOS is a joy to use. (i know it's a separate distro but besides branding and installing, there's no difference at all)

Separate distro

Purple Arch 👿
- I love purple Arch.
- Pretty much, lol (with a GUI installer too). I like how it looks so I think that's a good thing x)
EndeavourOS represent! 🪐🚀 Much easier install plus some pretty sick wallpapers, all without being hostile to users like ~~Windows is~~ some proprietary operating systems.
- some pretty sick wallpapers
  
  The actual state of Linux distributions.
- EndeavourOS is awesome. I use it on everything now. It definitely makes Arch more user friendly.
I had slight issues with cachy but once I manually partitioned with gparted it worked well, (did the exact steps it wouldve done automatically) Was still easy using a graphical interface and mouse for everything

Might swap to endeavor tho seems more stable even tho ive had no issues past preinstall, just want to commit long term to linux and it seems easier to do with endeavor over cachy

honestly, I've had arch on all my machines for 5y now. the install was simple, as long as you followed instructions to the letter.

the rolling release is beautiful. i never ever have to go through the install again

Used Arch for a few years as well. Recommending it to newcomers who do not specifically ask for a learning experience is just vile.

Specifying intent in the meme would've been too much text in my opinion though. In general I think unless specified one shouldn't expect newcomers to be into learning tech, but into ease of use.
And your shift key is still not working?
- What is the best package for enabling capitalization?
I have a machine which has a much older installation. I've destroyed the pacman folder on the var partition accidentally which made my pacman stop working since it had no db and no idea of what packages were installed. I still managed to restore it with some weird scripts after that and is still working fine after like 2 years.

Arch is freaking resilient, but mostly because I didn't want to reinstall since everything else is working xD
You say that but when I tried it refused to connect to the internet no matter what I tried

everything is simple once you know how to do it. i think a lot of the arch recommenders likely don’t realize how difficult some of these things can be the first time. it’s the same with any kind of specialized knowledge i think. it’s one of the reasons why teaching can be difficult. but the arch community has been super helpful in my experience

It's a general problem with the community in my experience. People keep saying it's "simple", then whip 3 terminal commands out of their pocket nobody without extensive knowledge would understand (or be able to tell if they do something wrong). They just don't realize how much knowledge they possess in comparison, and/or how little others are interested in gaining said knowledge (not because they're ignorant, but simply because they got other priorities in life).

The community really needs an "injection of normies" for some people to wake up from their elitism trip.
- Tacit knowledge really is a problem in the Linux community, but also in the rest of society.
- People keep saying it's "simple", then whip 3 terminal commands out of their pocket nobody without extensive knowledge would understand
  
  People do the same thing for all Linux distributions though. You'll see people telling you to run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade like you'll see people telling you to run pacman -Syu.
  
  Not arguing that Arch is easy, just that this specifically doesn't feel like a counter argument.
Another thing that I hadn't really thought about before reading another comment in this thread is that the arch wiki install guide (and other pages) are written with the assumption that you want to understand what you're doing. And I think for many people that's just not the case. Which is fair enough, not everyone enjoys tinkering with software. Just like I'm currently paying someone to build my new pc for me because I really don't enjoy doing that. But there have been a few places within the arch install process where I had to research some background info to know what to optimally do for my use case instead of taking a guess and hoping it works out. And that's quite a barrier, I see people struggle with similar things all the time at work. If any research is required beyond what your step by step guide is telling them, many people will give up.
It's true. Simple things like "be sure to review AUR scripts before installing" are so easy to say, but incredibly difficult to really explain what you're looking for that could be problematic.

The worst part about "simple" is defining what that means for the person. Depending on what they mean, there are a lot of different answers.

(And a good chunk of those are just Debian with different branding).

As others have said, EndeavourOS is pretty damn easy too. Personally I'll stick to Arch for desktop, deb stable for servers/lxc's, and deb sid for mostly screwing around and sending some reports in so stable can be stable.