Wrong point about Arch though. You can get a lot of shit done with Arch since it has the AUR and is not forcing you to reinstall anything from scratch from an old distro and kernel combo every 2 years.

And it doesn't surprise you with something - or some combination of things - that are installed. If you need it, you put it there, otherwise it's not in your way.

I'm on Mac at the moment and frequently pine for Arch. 'What on Earth just happened...', 'What did that...', 'What is this...', 'Well that wouldn't have happened on Arch.'

People claim Mac 'just works' because of out-of-the-box readiness, well I'd say in contrast Arch 'still works' or 'keeps working': it does what you tell it and if you don't tell it to change, it stays working in the same way.

I am starting to get somewhat disenchanted with the whole “the Mac just works” thing. I suppose their recent dip in QA effort is to blame to some extent. But also, whenever something doesn’t work, and Apple doesn’t care enough to fix it —- tough luck. On Linux you at least have options if you’re a technical person and are not afraid of the command line.

I just wish I could pay a company that would have engineers and designers building an actual user-friendly, stable OS on top of Linux. Mac OS, with all its faults, is still miles ahead in terms of usability and polish.

Fair. I don't install Arch to get stuff done, I decided to stick with debian derivatives and xfce for that, but not everyone is the same.