[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.