What do you get out-of-the-box in this distro? Trick question: it doesn't come in a box. With Arch, you configure your operating system yourself. Arch Linux is simply the most vanilla you can get when it comes to Linux operating systems. Sure, a lot of people will discourage you to jump into it because of the steep learning curve, but it's absolutely worth it. It might take you an entire week to just install it, but just by getting into a tty terminal of your newly-installed system, you've already learned so much about how Linux works. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. With Arch, you're getting yourself in full control of your system, choosing all your configurations along the way and learning bits and pieces about how Linux and computers work in general. Ultimately, the best thing about Arch is its simplicity and its philosophy. There is absolutely no bloat. All you ever start with are the essentials to make your computer beep. Just add what you need when you need it. And since you put everything together yourself, you can tailor each Arch installation specific to your needs. Need to install Arch on a 30-year-old laptop? Or perhaps you want a portable Arch installation on a 4GB thumb drive? Configure your system in the best way possible for your use-case. Personally, I was attracted by Arch because I never really liked the window managers bundled with any OS ever. Replacing it with another leaves my system with unused packages I may never see again, and that just feels dirty to me. The other beauty of Arch is its package repositories and the AUR. If it's on linux, you can probably bet that there is an Arch package for it. All the packages are just so diverse, and you can easily build your own PKGBUILD configurations if none exist for the program you need. Lastly, Arch Linux is a rolling release distro. Personally, I find this as an advantage since it's much less of a hassle to upgrade especially when you can do it more often. It has been a very rare case that I break existing packages when upgrading, unlike on biannually-releasing distros like Ubuntu.

It has a minimal memory footprint, allowing the system to work mostly on essential tasks. Moreover, I like to have full control over system: Arch comes with a minimal CLI version; on top of this only the required packages are installed, in contrast with some more user-friendly distributions where all packages are installed, and then the user must delete all the non-required ones, often not being able to detect all of them.

The ability to make the workstation do/be anything I need. Very good when "wearing multiple hats" and extremely customizable. Compared to Windows 10, it is several times faster and much sleeker in design and use. The AUR makes installation of non-standard packages very easy. With pacman/AUR, you have far more choices than you would with Ubuntu and APT.