My 2012 MBP is getting a bit long in the tooth, and had several software-ish issues that were totally unfixable. As a long time Linux user, I decided to switch

My 2012 MBP is getting a bit long in the tooth, and had several software-ish issues that were totally unfixable. As a long time Linux user, I decided to switch back, and purchased a powerful laptop to replace it. I did a similar survey of distros, and haven't been happy with any of them. Ubuntu worked fairly well in a vanilla configuration, but as a developer, I prefer a more powerful and customizable desktop UI. My preferred window manager is awesomewm, but trying to get it to integrate with Unity or Gnome-shell is pretty much impossible. If I run just bare awesome, I lose all the power management & audio niceties. I can probably set it all back up, but documentation on how to do so is slim. Additionally, installing newer software than what is provided by apt is a giant pain. You basically have to hope the vendor provides their own apt repository for you to use, and that they've updated it for Zesty. Arch linux was by far my favorite before I switched to OSX ~10 years ago. It always has the latest software available in core. Additionally, AUR provides betas and even more esoteric software. Anything I come across here or on reddit probably already has an AUR package for it, and in the rare case it does not, it is trivial to write a PKGBUILD for it. However, installing Arch is way harder than it used to be, particularly on laptops. There's so much variety and complexity in hardware now, you could spend a month getting everything set up and it still would not be satisfactory. Power management, sound, full-disk-encryption, webcam, display hot-plugging, hardware sensors... I used Fedora for quite awhile on a desktop before I got this laptop, and really enjoyed it. However, the latest Fedora uses wayland for everything, which doesn't work with the closed nvidia drivers, and nouveau on the 1070 in this laptop basically doesn't work. However, `dnf` is 10x better than `apt`, and I found it much easier to find copr repositories for updated software. Maybe I'll revisit once wayland and nvidia work together. I wish there was a distro half-way in between Arch and Ubuntu/Fedora. A nice installer that autodetects and sets up hardware automatically, but still easy to hack on. The problem with the former, though, is you pretty much need the resources of Canonical or Red Hat to get it done. Also, for the record, I love systemd. I've been using unixes for 20 years, and never managed to grok init scripts that I was comfortable creating or modifying them. Systemd (like Upstart and Launchd before it) is a huge improvement over that mess.