The UNIX course taken in college served me well and got me motivated to pick up things where I left off. I was using some other Linux distribution before switching to Arch Linux. The main reason for choosing Arch Linux is that it's a simple distro and not as bloated as Ubuntu, for example. You actually know what each running process does and what is installed on the operating system because not many applications come pre-installed, only the essentials.
In contrast, I would not recommend using this distro on servers, only on desktop computers for geeks like me, because Red-Hat/CentOS and Debian are very stable with excellent package managers which makes it suitable for updating critical services hassle-free.
Besides that, ArchLinux is a very modern, high-customizable distribution.
