I have an arch laptop for work. Out of the box, wifi worked because I needed it for the installation. I never print, strongSwan worked as easy as on windows. Arch minimal does require you to tinker for it to look nice. You are right about that. But honestly theres a package for everything and pacman is easy to use. The biggest issue I had was getting geek fonts or whatever to display in my polybar. Audio worked out of the box.
Edit: and I guess I am being a little untruthful. The regular arch install is easier than windows. I chose minimal because in my opinion vanilla kde is an eyesore and I wanted i3 as a window manager and no desktop at all. But it took me 20 minutes maybe to look up some packages to start with, type them in the given line and I was off. I was ricing for a whole week after. But it was entirely functional without looking pretty.
I have an arch laptop for work. Out of the box, wifi worked because I needed it for the installation. I never print, strongSwan worked as easy as on windows. Arch minimal does require you to tinker for it to look nice. You are right about that. But honestly theres a package for everything and pacman is easy to use. The biggest issue I had was getting geek fonts or whatever to display in my polybar. Audio worked out of the box.
Edit: and I guess I am being a little untruthful. The regular arch install is easier than windows. I chose minimal because in my opinion vanilla kde is an eyesore and I wanted i3 as a window manager and no desktop at all. But it took me 20 minutes maybe to look up some packages to start with, type them in the given line and I was off. I was ricing for a whole week after. But it was entirely functional without looking pretty.