I have long wanted to try out Arch Linux and yesterday I took the step and installed it on my main machine. My first impression is that I am super impressed. Why?  For five reasons

1. It really was not hard to install and get everything to work. Sure some Linux experience and an extra computer for the online install guide is essential for success but everything worked by just following the step by step instructions on the official install guide. No googling, no sifting through forum threads and mailing list archives was required.
2. The packets are bleeding edge. Yet things work. Something that has annoyed me when running openSUSE for the last six months is that unusual packages are often old, sometimes ancient. This is not so with Arch Linux. More often than not, Arch ships the very latest version.
3. No religion concerning non-free software. I love freedom but I also love being practical. Sometimes one-of-a-kind software codes have weird licences. This can be a problem but it can also be worth it and Arch leaves this choice up to the user.
4. Arch uses a rolling release model. I do not exactly know why I like this so much because it seems I always break my systems about every 6 months anyway. But I do like it.
5. The AUR, which makes available even the very unusual packages that I use and love. Such as the free and open source structural analysis code CalculiX and its dependencies.