Surprised at the amount of love for Arch (incl derivatives) on this thread. Let me add my vote to it as well. I converted to Arch more than a year ago from Ubuntu for the same reason as many others here - the need for PPAs to get up to date versions of software and the dist-upgrade pains that come with PPAs.

One thing when using Arch, you won't get an out of the box experience and you will need to tweak almost every aspect of the system manually.

- Missing even a trivial step during installation (such as setting locale) can lead to quirky repercussions. The plus side is that getting your hands dirty during setup really familiarzes you with the system.

- Pacman (and Yaourt) is simply great and make updating, removing and filtering packages a breeze

- AUR (arch user repos) contain nearly every popular FOSS and non-FOSS software not provided officially. Installation and removal is painless with Yaourt. No more PPAs.

- Packages occasionally break. E.g. When libx265 is upgraded but VLC is not compiled against the latest version, resulting in the latter unable to play any media. These are usually fixed pretty quickly in the repos, or you can workaround with a bit of searching.

- Archwiki and the forums are some of the best resources to turn to when you eventually run into problems, and trust me you will