Surprised at the amount of love for Arch (incl derivatives) on this thread. Let me add my vote to it as well. I converted to Arch more than a year ago from Ubuntu for the same reason as many others here - the need for PPAs to get up to date versions of software and the dist-upgrade pains that come with PPAs.
One thing when using Arch, you won't get an out of the box experience and you will need to tweak almost every aspect of the system manually.
- Missing even a trivial step during installation (such as setting locale) can lead to quirky repercussions. The plus side is that getting your hands dirty during setup really familiarzes you with the system.
- Pacman (and Yaourt) is simply great and make updating, removing and filtering packages a breeze
- AUR (arch user repos) contain nearly every popular FOSS and non-FOSS software not provided officially. Installation and removal is painless with Yaourt. No more PPAs.
- Packages occasionally break. E.g. When libx265 is upgraded but VLC is not compiled against the latest version, resulting in the latter unable to play any media. These are usually fixed pretty quickly in the repos, or you can workaround with a bit of searching.
- Archwiki and the forums are some of the best resources to turn to when you eventually run into problems, and trust me you will
I second that. Unlike some other comments here, I personally have been driven to Arch for its rolling-release nature and not some problems over a window manager or ACPI:
I started with Ubuntu, which technically seems to do fine; however I always ended up wanting/needing to use some current version of some dev software (up to date compiler or a newer Qt Creator for cross compilation for example).
To get those newer versions, I found myself having to rely on PPAs providing them as well as the necessary libraries, which ended up destroying a dist upgrade half a year later. That happened to me at least 2 times.
After that, I tried Fedora and had various problems from the start (maybe that's not the case anymore). Then I ended up with Arch, and have never looked back.
So, if you want to use up to date software, I'd recommend you to strongly consider a rolling release distro. The occational fixing of a single package is worth it over the loss of multiple days/much hair reconstructing your old dev environment on the next distro version any day of the week.
There is nothing better than Arch. I have been using linux daily since 2005, tried multiple distros and now all of my machines (laptops, desktops, PIs, remote servers) run arch. Hardly ever a problem and making packages is a so damn easy compared to any other distro.
Definitely interested in an answer here, too. If the rolling release ain't bad enough, the focus on bleeding-edge would ordinarily make Arch the absolute least desirable production server OS imaginable. I certainly don't have that kind of courage :)
That makes sense, yes. However, since we're talking about a dev-machine here, that doesn't necessarily apply.
Of course, this is much a matter of taste, but "stable" environments can work to the detriment of a developer's productivity (especially since many developer tools improve quite fast these days). It might be a mistake to discard a tool/distro just because it didn't do what you expected for an unrelated use case.
Edit: Also note that "server" != "production code". I run a couple of servers (OpenVPN, Backups, mopidy) using Arch (on Raspberry Pis) at home, that doesn't mean I'd use it for a public facing web server.
