I mean, we wouldn't have this without arch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ngwv_r-zzI0

(George Hotz livestreaming himself installing arch, just for the sake of it)

Watched it while having half a bottle of merlot, _easily_ the best content I've seen to date.

arch feels to me like an over-engineered mess. For a truer unix experience I'd rather suggest void or slack.

It's not perfect, but I find it's in a good intersection between "simple" but still "fairly mainstream", which has its advantages.

I used to run Slackware, and the user experience is pretty terrible compared to Arch or OpenBSD. The absence of a package manager that tracks dependencies is not a “truer” Unix experience. All the BSDs provide a more Unixy experience than Linux and they all track dependencies.

If Slackware was updated more often, the system would work better. The dynamic libs are always way out of date, and god help you if you want to install a newer version.

this depends on your point of view. For me, being able to install a package even when some dependences are not met is a fundamental feature.

Regarding the versions, slackware-current is a very up-to-date rolling distro (e.g. much more so than ubuntu).

I mean, you can install packages without deps with Arch as well. Also, why is that important to you?

Same for Debian and its forks (dpkg --ignore-depends) and I'm pretty sure rpm/yum has a similar option.

I use arch exactly for that reason, but I could not imagine getting started with arch as my first linux experience. You should at least learn the basics on ubuntu first. I think there's a good natural progression with linux, and that you can and should switch to arch once you outgrow ubuntu.