Arch Linux teaches skills like:

- Knowing what happens if I have the audacity to update my computer without reading 3 different forum threads

- Understanding how to fix hilariously bad font rendering issues in a terminal, a software paradigm that's almost as old as computers themselves

- Tempering expectations that incredibly obscure apps like "Spotify" will "just work".

I think to imply Arch teaches much beyond the skills needed to deal with Arch Linux is a tenuous premise at best.

Contrary to the popular belief that Linux has no games, Arch includes many fun games such as "find out why the audio decided to stop working today for no reason"

I use Spotify for hours every day and I've had absolutely zero issues with it since I moved to Arch 3 or so years ago.

Agreed on the fonts, that has always been a pain. That being said, I recently installed Arch on a new laptop and the fonts weren't too bad out of the box - times change.

I update at least twice a week and I've only had one breakage in 3 years - I didn't update a config file with some new settings.

All in all, your response comes across a little FUDdy IMO.

My experience of Arch is that it's fun as a home computer tinkering exercise but I don't trust it for my work computer since I can't resist a version number bump and the amount of time spent faffing around would be a nightmare.

I think it can definitely differ between individual systems - the fact that Arch is so flexible also means that each system can have individual little foibles. Personally speaking, I've used Arch for work for the 3 years mentioned previously with no problems. At my previous job I used to be oncall for a week at a time and I wouldn't upgrade during those periods just in case, but that was the extent of my caution.

This is all way too close to home, but I legitimately think the time I spent on arch made me more productive on linux machines.

I used a variety of GNU/Linux distros: Ubuntu, Debian, and Arch, Slackware, Frugalware, Fedora and more recently openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Honestly, I don't understand what makes Arch so special.

I have mostly learned things on Ubuntu and I can use Arch just fine, and I think I have a decent understanding how things work.

Really, I think there is nothing fundamentally different across these distributions technically speaking.

Their biggest differences lie in their package and release management and policies (and, agreed, this is huge).

I'm not sure what skill you would learn on Arch and not on Ubuntu. It seems some vocal Arch users are lying to themselves and to the rest of the world about this.

Gentoo (or LFS) might probably be more educational, but I haven't used Gentoo enough, and haven't tried LFS enough to say.

(Kudos for Arch's documentation though, useful even when using another distro)

I'm not a zealot or anything, I just like Arch because of certain good aspects. Great documentation for everything I could want to do (though it used to be better). Rolling release. Upstream, latest packages. AUR. On that note, I tend to prefer Manjaro unstable nowadays because it works out of the box and still gets me the latest packages.

I don't particularly care for the whole DIY aspect. I spend enough time tinkering with Emacs and other tools that I don't want to waste any time on configuring/tweaking the OS itself. The different Manjaro versions are pretty decent (currently using the Awesome WM one), and I really like the Manjaro CLI installer (manjaro-architect) if I want a bit more control over my installation.