After hearing nearly everyone rave about Arch Linux for a while now, especially ex Ubuntu users, I decided to give the thing a shot. I really had no idea what it was about, other than a more poweruser friendly distro akin to Gentoo, but without the silly compliling of every single package.
I have been using Ubuntu for a very long time now, and my tries to switch to other distros have ended quite poorly, so I decided to install it only on my laptop, and dualboot Ubuntu as well in case I couldn't do my schoolwork on it.
So I downloaded a cd image, burned it and booted up the laptop from the disc. I immideately realized that this was no beginner distro as the installer greeted me with a prompt and a directory containing a txt file with instructions on how to proceed.
At this point it is worth mentioning that I've been using and installing Linux distros for 15 years now, and I found the Arch installation challenging. I tried to do it without using another machine to read instructions from the net, but it did not last long until I was googling for answers.
To give a sense of the level of expertise need, the instructions goes a bit like this: "Partition your disk", "Format your partitions and mount onto /mnt", "chroot into /mnt and continue from there". It offered some suggestions as to what tools could be used for the less obvious things, and there are a lot of very handy cli tools available for connecting to wireless networks and the like.
After that point stuff got really hard. You have to install and configure your bootloader of choice, and some of the tools are a bit buggy, so to get the system to boot up required a lot of googling. I finally found a youtube video of all thing that explained how to fix the grub configuration. Something that could have been written i two lines in the wiki. (Speaking of which, I should maybe add those two lines.)
Once you have a booting system you can start adding stuff to it. The base install is extremely minimal by todays standard. There is also a huge difference in how Arch resolves dependencies to how Ubuntu does it. In Arch a dependecy is pretty much only things that are needed to install the package, it doesn't really matter if you can actually run it or not. For example X is not a requirement of gnome.
This does however result in a beautifully lean system, you just add all the things you need yourself. This includes things like network manager and cups.
After a bit of tweaking and installing, I have gotten a quite nice OS for my laptop. And as there is not one single focus like Unity in Ubuntu, the other DEs seem a bit more whole. I was expecting to use Ubuntu for my daily driver, and only tweak stuff in Arch as a hobby on the side, but I have found myself not using Ubuntu at all. After the initial install, I've basically only booted into Ubuntu to edit some settings in grub to boot to Arch as default. It's using Ubuntus grub install now, because I installted it after Arch.
I'm having dangerous thoughts of installing Arch on my desktop as well, but I will wait a while longer to see if something pops up that prove to be difficult to handle.
One fun thing about changing everything up is that as everything is so totally different, there is no reason to stick with the tried and true. So I'm trying out Cinnamon again, and zsh for the first time. Zsh is a bit strange compared to bash, but it really is a shell on steroids. It totally lacks many of my pet peeves with bash, and seems like a really powerful tool. I haven't gotten the git integration working yet, but I really think I will switch to zsh full time regardless of distro.
In conclusion. Arch is a really good distro, and above all tons of fun to work with. If you are the kind of person who like to do stuff in a GUI, stay very far away from Arch. You are absolutely forced to learn how stuff works in Arch, but at the same time it's fun and quite easy to do.
You don't have to be an advanced Linux user to use Arch, but you have to have nerves of steel and lots of time. And it's probably a good idea to get someone to help you install it if you find manually editing fstab and installing bootloaders intimidating. I can imagine that some problems would take a long time to figure out, and you have to be comfortable googling stuff.
Before trying Arch I thought that at this point I would be most comfortable with a distro that just works, like Ubuntu. But the thing is, if you like to fiddle a lot with your system, Arch seems a bit easier to do that with once you get over the initial hurdle of actually having a GUI and a network connection and other such minor details.
If by reading this you find the concept of trying Arch intresting, I can wholeheartedly recommend trying it. I really don't think you will be disappointed.