

Exactly. When purchasing any modern device I ask myself as to how much a company can screw me if they turn hostile out of nowhere. If I can’t handle that risk, I don’t purchase that product. Not having open source firmware that’s connected to the internet is a huge red flag.
Depends. There’s also the included
archinstall
script, which skips all of that. Just some minimal configuration you find on most distros (Language/Time Zones/Mirrors…) and that’s it.So yeah, nowadays it’s totally possible to end up with a working Arch installation without knowing anything about it besides that one command.