I liked Ubuntu and Unity until I found this release to be so unstable on a Thinkpad T410 that I was forced to look for something else. First I tried Xubuntu but

I liked Ubuntu and Unity until I found this release to be so unstable on a Thinkpad T410 that I was forced to look for something else. First I tried Xubuntu but I quickly began to miss many of the niceties of a more featureful desktop environment. Feeling a general dissatisfaction with Ubuntu I decided to try Arch Linux. It was quite a task to configure a base system with video drivers, networking and other hardware working at a similar level that you would get out of the box with Ubuntu. But in the end I'm extremely pleased. I went with the Gnome 3 desktop because it handled a lot of things for me such as drive mounting and managing the network. I actually prefer Gnome 3 to Unity. It's more visually pleasing and minimal. The only thing I miss is the HUD for accessing deeply-nested menu items. The best thing about Arch Linux is that most packages are the absolute latest stable versions. You don't have to wait 6 months for an update to the official package. And if there's no official package, the AUR system for building packages from source is better than Ubuntu's PPA which requires you to trust binaries compiled by 3rd parties.