It's been years since I tested a Mint release - love the simplicity of the distro. Debian and Arch Linux distros are very complex for most people, and I recall trying then giving up on both of them. I just felt the post-installation work was a learnig curve I wasn't willing to start to master. I have heard they are both very good once they are installed - they run smoothly, with little to no maintanance needed.

For myself, I have played around with Mandriva about 8 years ago, then settled with Fedora soon after Mandriva kind of disbanded. I like Fedora's wide choice of extra repos and the easy-to-install full encryption during installations.

I am glad you paid my blog a visit and I will follow yours. Take care.

EDIT: I just searched and had to correct my statements here - Mandriva didn't entirely disband, the project lives on in OpenMandriva, and another project Mageia - both doing quite fine to date information here