Don't let "manual intervention" scare you

I have been (mostly) a GNU/Linux user for the past six years. I started with Ubuntu and Mint, but then I started deep dive into the system for various reasons and I began to be frustrated. I found apt limiting in some ways, I couldn't be able to do what I wanted with my system. So I switched to Arch.
I'm not a fanboy of anything in particular, nor I am a fanboy of a particular GNU/Linux distribution, but believe me, I feel Arch Linux is like home now and I don't feel I need to look for something else.
"Keep it simple, stupid" doesn't necessarily mean you have to press some random buttons to get things to work, without knowing what are you doing. It means, I guess, to have the power to do everything on your system without extras and nonsense that prevent you from doing REALLY what you want. It's doing things in an elegant way, without unnecessary steps that keep you away from YOUR computer and YOUR distribution.

Of course, this implies you have to be a little bit more conscious of what you are doing, and to not be afraid of troubleshooting if something goes wrong. Freedom comes from consciousness. Even if Arch was a distro that required more technical knowledge (and, as you pointed out, it really is not), I didn't think this was a bad thing, after all.

/r/archlinux Thread