With the release of mkinitcpio v38, several hooks previously provided by Arch packages have been moved to the mkinitcpio upstream project. The hooks are: systemd, udev, encrypt, sd-encrypt, lvm2 and mdadm_udev.
To ensure no breakage of users’ setup occurs, temporary conflicts have been introduced into the respective packages to prevent installing packages that are no longer compatible.
The following packages needs to be upgraded together:
- mkinitcpio 38-3
- systemd 255.4-2
- lvm2 2.03.23-3
- mdadm 4.3-2
- cryptsetup 2.7.0-3
Please note that the mkinitcpio flag --microcode, and the microcode option in the preset files, has been deprecated in favour of a new microcode hook. This also allows you to drop the microcode initrd lines from your boot configuration as they are now packed together with the main initramfs image.
Other reason is that a newbie (or even advanced user, but someone digging in more) won’t even benefit from Arch.
I personally cannot imagine using anything other than Arch, but no way I am going to recommend it for someone who don’t know what a bootloader is. But recommending to install it in VM is good tho, teaches a lot.