I ironically get the most stability out of arch. Like you said, you front load a lot of the effort. Tweaking, setting up important packages, etc. Once that is d

I ironically get the most stability out of arch. Like you said, you front load a lot of the effort. Tweaking, setting up important packages, etc. Once that is done, as long as you update it really gets out of your way. Occasionally something will break and there will be a notice on the front page of the arch site. Ubuntu suffers something that effects windows really badly. In an attempt to polish, you obfuscate a lot of moving parts. When one of those parts break down, it becomes far harder to repair. I also understand the irony of wanting people to switch to Linux then being against a polished distro.