[skshetry]

Arch Linux. Why?: It's simple and how you want it to be. The wiki is great and the Arch Repo is great. With AUR and official repo, you will never need to look elsewhere for packages and it's very simple, unlike, Ubuntu's PPA. And, even with the rolling release, it's pretty stable.I used Ubuntu previously and had a lot of problems with stability. I have been more than a year now on archlinux.

[bananicorn]

Couldn't agree more (mostly on the part that Pacman and the AUR are amazing).

I was so intimidated by the whole "build your own system" philosophy, that I never tried, and it was only after asking on HN for advice[0] that I finally gave it a shot.

Software-wise the best decision of my life so far.

It also taught me that "RTFM" is often the best solution, and that man pages are there for a reason.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14437632

[btschaegg]

That's pretty much my sentiment on Arch, too. I have another point, however, that is also very important to me:

If I break something, I can fix it. Guaranteed. That's not completely due to the experience you gather doing the "manual installation of everything" dance, but also due to how this process works. I've never had to reinstall my Arch system - there's always a way to save a botched installation.

As someone who likes to tinker with my systems sometimes (and who's reinstalled more screwed up Ubuntu/Fedora setups than I can count), that is really valuable to me.

[skshetry]

Yeah, it's really easy to fix things in Arch. Once, during 'pacman -Syyu' install, the linux kernel didn't install correctly and left the system broken. I just chrooted via a Arch live USB and reinstalled linux and was good to go again. This kind of issues hasn't happened since.

Around 2 years ago, I wanted to tinker and understand linux distros and have installed most of them. But, when I tried Arch, I settled with it,no more tinkering. However,I find it painful to install. I installed Arch successfully in third time.