Linux Mint Debian or SolydK or SolydX home edition?

Any reason for you not using the Ubuntu Precise PPA? It looks to me like it has the latest stable version of darktable.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3371527/run_log_play_with_shoes.png

Know about Linux Mint Debian and is on my potentials list; hadn't heard of SoldyK / SoldyX before. Any personal experience of / with that one?

I am using darktable's own repo; and likewise a variety of other repos for other specialist software. Which works, but having a lot of them is a bit messy. Nothing of all this is a dealbreaker of course, but the great thing with Linux distro's is, after all, that there are so many to choose from :). There might be that thing that's a tiny bit more 'me' out there - hence the interest in Arch / Manjaro.

And ye; the best thing to do is to just run them for a while and see myself, of course. Am in the middle of loads of deadlines though, so there's just not the time to play around with distros, just right now. Getting some first hand impressions from others is nice, thus. :)

While I haven't used Manjaro, I do run Arch on both my laptop (Thinkpad T500) and my tower (random parts) - the netbook, an Asus Eee 1001, runs Debian testing - and while I do have multiple machines (and thus the safety net of internet knowledge), I didn't actually need more than the Arch Linux Beginners' Guide for the first setup (and the ones after that became easier as I began to remember more and more steps, yeah, I've done a few installations, both on virtual and actual machines). Print that out so you have it available if you decide to go with Arch.

You know what? :P

I, on the other hand, found it quite educational and interesting.

Then again, that's likely the reason I'm drawn to Linux rather than Windows' and OS X's "click-click-done".

Also, I'd argue that installing Arch - even while referring to the manual every single step - is a lot faster than installing Windows from a common non-customized installation medium. Arch pulls everything from the net and gives you the latest version from the get-go, while Windows has hundreds of updates to do, and can't do them all in one batch but has to restart half a dozen times at best.

I use Linux too but what exactly is interesting in typing commands in terminal?

I would assume, but you didn't mention it. I'm running SoldyK as my main desktop. From what I had read people seemed to like it more than Mint Debian. The guy behind it was part of Mint's packaging team and supplied the unofficial KDE/XCFE builds of Mint Debian. I haven't done much with it since installing, too many FTL runs. Then again I haven't needed to.

Like most people; when presented with a series of next-next-next buttons, I rarely think about what happens under the hood (and much of the time, I don't have the option because everything is built to hide that from me), but when it's simple to get below the shiny buttons, and even more so when I have to learn to work with it at all, I find it a lot more enjoyable. Being forced to do stuff manually, figuring out what chipset is in the esoteric piece of hardware I have and installing its driver, having to tell udev that "these two SATA ports should be handled by udisks2 and automount so that I won't have to authenticate as root in order to mount discs". It's educational, and I enjoy learning how stuff I use work.

* It's faster
* It's more powerful than clicking a button (options)
* I get feedback

I find nothing interesting, it just lets me do things faster. Heck, I use the same approach on Windows system where possible. It also makes support easier since typing a few commands in a terminal window is easier to explain then, go to this menu, open that, click on that other thing... bla bla bla.

I agree, although I find that for some things using the commandline winds up being extremely fast. Such as cases where I'm using xargs and such to automate repetitious tasks.