The slow manual install process? I can't remember any of it, and would have to read a howto again if I had to do it -- but I think it went a LONG way towards demystifying things: everything was just user-editable config files and sources. There's no magic, and almost everything is something I can change with compiler flags.
Of course, I now heart ubuntu and debian, because I tend to agree with the choices of most package maintainers as far as compilation options, and my computer is fast enough that I don't think I'd notice if my office binary were maximally optimized or not. ;) However, I might not have gotten here had I not been exposed to Gentoo and Slackware long ago.
I agree, though, that sticking to Ubuntu or Fedora for new users is a great idea. They are both excellent operating systems with regard to simplicity.
By any chance are you running OS X on Apple hardware? If we took OS X and installed it on an Ubuntu Certified Dell PC we may find that it has the stability issues, so if you are comparing it to OS X running on Apple hardware it's not a very fair comparison, as it's being run under ideal circumstances and Linux is not.
In those circumstances you shouldn't have any "stability" issues because it's a like for like set of engineering - basically.
In general, in terms of your other comparison with "any" hardware on the Ubuntu side - the two most likely causes of problems are hardware drivers and user fiddling (ie mixing repos and kernels). Lack of engineering support from manufacturers for client hardware is a big issue that's outside the Linux distros control. Nonetheless, if you use common supported hardware and standard installs then you shouldn't be having stability issues.
Personally Debian Sid is my top choice, Arch being close second, and SlackWare being third for sentimental value.
Ubuntu always breaks on me after a while. Mint destroyed two separate and different installations with its full disk encryption. Gentoo is too much work. Fedora... I just cant bring myself to use something called yum. The Mandrakes, Mandrivas, PureOS's, et. al. and the derivative distros just feel like crutches to me. In my opinion nothing come close to the simplicity and straightforwardness of Debian.
They use dnf now.
I started by using Fedora, which worked well for me, but there were occaisional annoyances, like having to install a lot of software to /opt and /usr/local instead of making custom packages because rpms are a pain to make, and some major, and difficult to compile and configure software (specifically mono), being too out of date to satisfy dependencies for something I wanted to use (KnightOS development tools written in a recent version of C#). When I wanted to edit the configuration of some software, it was much more difficult than it needed to be because it was already running a custom configuration highly tailored to Fedora. Rather than just finding support online and doing what it said, I had to invest quite a bit of time into figuring out how the software worked, and how it integrated into the fedora system, before having a high enough level of understanding to figure out the changes that needed to be made myself.
After just 6 months of using fedora I migrated to Arch. The installation process was slightly cumbersome. I had never configured wifi using anything other than a graphical wizard, and even though netctl is really easy to use, it took some getting used to. Partitioning my drive without gparted or OS X disk utility was daunting. But none of these were too big of challenges, because the beginners guide, and the rest of the Arch Wiki, were so thorough and easy to follow.
I installed GNOME and never ran into any issues. Nothing ever broke, except when I installed incompatible video drivers, but that was my fault and easily fixable by booting from the installation disk. Unlike in fedora, almost any software I could ask for was in the official repositories, configured minimally. If it wasn't, then it was on AUR. And for the software that no one but I use, creating my own package was so incredibly trivial that it was almost easier than manually compiling from source.
A couple months later I added a second arch installation to my machine with full disk encryption (keeping around the old one because I had no where to back up to at the time). And then a couple months I replaced both installations with a cleaner (gummiboot instead of isolinux, luks on lvm rather than lvm on luks), bigger (occupying my whole drive rather than just half) arch linux installation.
Just a couple days ago I reconfigured my system to run debian and arch in dual boot with a shared home partition, both with in an lvm configuration over luks. While the debian installer was powerful relative to fedora's and ubuntu's, I found that I had to drop down into its very underpowered busybox shell several times to acheive the configuration I was going for. In comparison the Arch installer is just a full live arch installation with arch-chroot and pacstrap bundled in to be able to manage packages on a foreign system.
tl;dr I think that if you encourage new users to focus on the fundamentals of using linux, the "easy to use" distros will quickly become harder to use than the more "advanced" distros.
My point, which I now realize I thoroughly obfuscated, is that by only providing low-level tools and focusing on making them simple and transparent and well-documented, Arch makes its inner-working much more accessible to beginners, at the cost of maybe seeming impenetrable to the total noob.
You can also install a debootstrap binary for most other distros and bootstrap a Debian chroot system in less than 3min ; )
>I trust that all the smart people using debian are onto something.
The big contrast with Debian and Arch are their package maintenance policies and release cycles.
The Debian community strives for a system that works well together and is stable above all else. Software must conform to standards of quality and stability, might be modified by their maintainers to that end and will be staged through the whole experimental -> unstable -> testing lifecycle before being deemed stable. This is a big deal for systems that you rely on or that you'd like to set and forget. Having the guarantee that software Works and updates won't break the system are also important.
From my experience, Arch is much more liberal about their packaging and is closer to the Debian sid/unstable experience in that you have access to bleeding edge packages that work 95% of the time, but sometimes you need to get you hands dirty to get your system working.