Absolutely, you just have to get over that initial hump and you're away. I forgot to mention Pacman, you're right, it's a fantastic package manager and by far the best I've ever used.

I've been using Arch for a long time now and I really think it is a fantastic distro. It requires a little more knowledge than some others such as Mint/fedora etc. but this means that you learn a lot whilst you're getting everything sorted. The documentation is extremely well written and I've always found it easy to follow, and there is a great community who are very friendly to new starters.

I like the fact that you chose precisely what goes into your system, so you can have gnome, kde, openbox... the list is endless. From a development point of view the speed at which packages are updated is fantastic, meaning that you're always using the latest versions.

I've been very happy with python, specifically using numpy and scipy. As well as this don't discount languages such as c++, there is a huge amount of flexibility, and libraries such as Eigen make it a fantastic platform for numerical computation.

Linen