This is a great post. I would just highlight two things that stand out for Arch for me that are underplayed here:
- The size of the community directly correlates to the ease of troubleshooting both in terms of googling answers because other have already had the same issue you are having and in terms of having a pool of experienced users who can help troubleshoot the issue you are having.
- pacman may not be the speediest package manager (though it’s certainly not slow) but it is very intuitive with a streamlined interface that is easy to pick up.
I guess I’m also going to quibble on the btrfs criticism. I’ve used btrfs on 3 machines for the past 5+ years without any issues. I probably don’t really need the features of btrfs but the potential to use snapshots for rescuing a system was pretty seductive for me. It also made adding capacity very straightforward by just expanding the volume to include a new drive.
