During the first impressions of said distro, what feature surprised you the most?
Arch Linux. Everyone said it was hard to use, unstable, etc. but my experience with it has been the exact opposite.
Yes, the install process is needlessly complicated (although it got a lot simpler now that we have archinstall), but the OS itself is rock solid and rarely has any issues that require more than a reboot or a package reinstall to solve. The AUR is a godsend too if you don’t want or don’t know how to compile stuff from source.
Arch Linux has by far the best community, the support wiki is the most useful wiki to Linux there is, it basically covers everything. Mad props to the arch Linux community.