There's nothing wrong with preferences. It's why I don't care much for Debian-based distributions (Debian/Ubuntu make some weird choices, IMO, some for historic

There's nothing wrong with preferences. It's why I don't care much for Debian-based distributions (Debian/Ubuntu make some weird choices, IMO, some for historical reasons and some because it's just the way they do things). Although I will counter that Arch is substantially less "manual work" than certain other popular distros, like Gentoo! Likewise, much of the Arch wiki centers on third party software--and sometimes more advanced installation options like mdadm, etc. (Although I will concede that the latter is much easier to configure under Ubuntu during installation; the difference is that under more manual distros, you're essentially forced to learn the tool at an earlier stage.) To be honest, I don't think it's a matter of "better" options for learning/manual installations as much as there are different options (Gentoo is more manual; LFS would be "better" in terms of understanding ground-up distributions). Please don't take me as being contrarian! I just happen to really like Arch. I'm also fond of Gentoo and FreeBSD, and begrudgingly use Ubuntu for situations its better suited for, because sometimes you don't want to upgrade to the newest version of a package (Arch's recent OpenSSL bump from 1.0.2 to 1.2.x can cause some issues). Anyway, I appreciate your opinions! Everyone's different and has different preferences for different reasons (past experiences, patience levels, familiarity, etc)--and that's a good thing! Arch certainly isn't for everyone, but I think it fills the rolling release without long build cycles (with just the defaults, please) niche quite well. However, I still recommend Ubuntu for newcomers or for people who simply don't want the headache!