It is not really a complete experience. It is ugly, and for the type of person that wants to play in the weeds
Wtf are you even talking about? Setup Debian with all the defaults, it’s easier than Windows and you’ll get GNOME out of the box. Ugly?
or figuring out flatpaks
Running 2 commands to get all the flatpak software into the GNOME GUI store is very hard :P
Debian provides a solid out of the box experience, a system that won’t break and will be compatible with most of the decent hardware out there. It won’t complain and bitch, it won’t be an half finished product like Arch. If it’s too complicated just get Ubuntu and enjoy it’s mangled kernel.
Arch / Gentoo are the real “base installs” here, nobody can run those things out of the box without tweaks. Arch doesn’t even have an installer, just a bunch of scripts and 3rd party attempts and making something usable and you’re recommending over Debian that has a full GUI with sane defaults?