Knowing little about Arch Linux, I dismissed it entirely, even though a good sysadmin friend uses it exclusively on his laptop.

In my personal life, I first installed Slackware in 1995 but had converted to Debian by 1997 and I've used that almost exclusively until the last two years or so (I have one RHEL6 and one FreeBSD server). I have, of course, used RHEL and Ubuntu previously in my professional life.

About six months ago, I installed Arch Linux on a new Thinkpad W530. I didn't intend to really use it, I just wanted to see what the fuss was about. It's stuck around and I'm still running it and I haven't had the first problem with it.

I'm not gonna be converting everything over to it, obviously, but it works for me on this laptop (which I do almost 100% of my work on).

YMMV but IWFM.