Disclaimer: I'm an arch TU. I think switching from debian/ubuntu/fedora (used to distro-hop as I wasn't ever really happy with them) to Arch Linux was probably

Disclaimer: I'm an arch TU. I think switching from debian/ubuntu/fedora (used to distro-hop as I wasn't ever really happy with them) to Arch Linux was probably one of the most productive things I've ever done, and I would recommend any daily linux user to switch to it (especially if you're a dev/hacker-minded person). The learning curve was a little steep at first, but the hump was over in very little time and it was worth it. I learned how things really worked inside what previously was a bit of a black box. This meant I could take better care of it, would be more efficient at finding things I may want to change or fix, and nothing ever felt irrecoverably lost to the point I would have to reinstall. In fact, I had a pretty bad SSD hiccup after a power surge a few weeks ago. The sort of thing that would have taken a Windows laptop out: A lot of system files were blanked out. I still don't know exactly what caused the crash itself, but I ended up with an unbootable system. Old me may have reinstalled the whole thing, but instead I ended up booting arch on a flash drive, debugging the issue, figuring out what had happened, fixing it, and ended up with a working system I'm typing this from. Now to be clear, if I don't want to deal with this kind of shit, nothing prevents me from a wipe&reinstall. Nothing stops me from running my stuff on a VM I don't have to manage, either. It's important not to let yourself completely waste your time on distractions. But this is meant as an advert on what Arch Linux taught me fairly passively over the years: Within the space of a couple of hours total, I was able to prepare a bootable usb, chroot into the broken system, debug bootloader issues, debug graphics issues, debug kernel module loading issues, and more. I never felt outside my comfort zone. Oh, and this also isn't my job. It just made me a hell of a lot better at my job, as these skills entirely transfer over to devops etc. ---- With all that said: Arch is very much no-fuss compared to Ubuntu. I had to deal with a lot of new stuff to learn the first few weeks, then practically nothing over most of the next decade. When using Ubuntu, I constantly had to deal with distractions… and when I end up ssh'd on an Ubuntu system, I still do have to deal with distractions to this day.