Debian is reliable, it's not fancy but you know you what you get, to me it's sort of gold standard when it comes to linux But then, aside from the fact that it's as sexy as a medical unit; you don't have the ppa stuff, which is quite handy when you "try everything until something sticks" tutorials or weird app testing, and of course you have the exotic hardwares issues related to proprietary drivers with the overall no proprietary policy by default... With debian you have to have 100% linux compatible hardware, which isn't the general rule especially when it comes to asus but not only. Ubuntu is more plug and play in that regard Arch is great, but there are two main issues; 1 it's a "bacteria", for quick easy install gofuckyourself you have to go through the entire "darwininan chain of evolution until you reach a satisfying development level".. Like installing really everything.... They made progress though, you have a couple of fast and easy debian like installers floating around, but still, if there's a driver surprise it's going to be a pain too by default. Also I don't like pacman, I picture that arcade yellow thing in my head every time I type it, it just doesn't feel very serious. You also had yaourt what a shitty handy thing. And 2) They lack man power I think, they add to drop some 32bit architectures now it's unofficial... https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Frequently_asked_questions#What_architectures_does_Arch_support? And MIPS, no mips architecture support, which is dumb IMO especially for arch which is minimalist by definition So for those reasons arch isn't my first goto choice, which is too bad because while their doc is fairly hard to digest, it's very complete, and I like their logo and the name too, for once it's not lame as fuck like bubuntu or fefedora