After hopping through every distro you mentioned, I ended up with Arch, which I&#x27;ve been running happily for several years now in VMs, desktops, laptops and even my retina macbook pro. Up to date kernels and drivers means I no longer have to deal with the pain of proprietary GPU drivers (Mesa3d is already better than the OSX drivers and rapidly improving).<p>The initial setup takes about an hour if you&#x27;ve never done it before (I keep the installation guide open on my tablet and go through it step by step.) Once you&#x27;ve done it once, reinstalling takes maybe 15 minutes on a fast internet connection.<p>That said, if you&#x27;ve decided your tinkering days are over, then your best bet is OSX. Myself, I have to use OSX, Windows and Linux for dev work, and Arch is the only distro I can tolerate these days. The lack of a graphical installer means it&#x27;s certainly not for everyone, however, once the initial setup it&#x27;s a breath of fresh air, compared to the constant buginess of Ubuntu and ($god forbid) Fedora.