And when I installed Manjaro it felt like a 13 years old edgy kid riced the defaults. As much as I liked installing Arch from scratch I'm not always in the mood to do it. And if you automate the process you're essentially doing the same (but you don't lose street cred right).
> It also has by far the best documentation of any distro.
It really is the best wiki format and has a lot of valueable content. I wish more projects mimicked the approach. When I'm using Debian's wiki it feels like I have to think too much.
And, sure, it's not Debian or CentOS, so you don't have as much attention focused on the packages. Their record of keeping malware out is pretty solid, though, as far as we know.
I think a lot of security has to do with simplicity: if you don't understand how your software is configured, you're likely to open up a security hole on your system.
Arch's "don't start doing stuff until the user tells you" posture does a good job of making sure the user is aware of what's running on her system. Contrast this to Debian, which will often start running random services as soon as you install a package (e.g. Apache).
Seemed really amateurish. Hopefully that's changed.
Also, it was really immature compared to Gentoo back then. Now it's had some time to mature, so I might give it another go sometime. But I'd really have to feel I'm getting a huge win over Gentoo to bother.
It has a similar "from scratch" policy, but all the official packages are pre-compiled. There's also the Arch User Repository, where you can find proprietary and unofficial packages, many of which will compile from source.
It also has by far the best documentation of any distro.