P.S. I know that this is a non-issue...a simple alias would prevent future woes.
There are a lot of components that have to work together for a Linux desktop to provide the features most people take for granted nowadays. If you don't want to bother with tinkering, Fedora provides one such configuration that generally works out of the box. Arch provides you with pacman and a really good wiki.
Both perfectly good systems. Both are reasonably up-to-date though Arch is more cutting edge, and Fedora has releases rather than rolling release. Fedora has a real company backing it at some level. Arch probably has the greatest package availability of any operating system (at all, if we allow the AUR).
> but forgetting to mount my boot
...so stick it in fstab? Using -o bind if need be.
The Arch vs. Fedora comparison is not very sensible given how different the update models are... if you're ok with Fedora's update schedule it can be a fine choice.
I sometimes go as long as a few months between updates on my desktop – and that's been running Arch for some years now and hasn't needed a reinstall from scratch.