So i've been using Arch Linux exclusively (outside school) for about 3 weeks now and all I can say is that i'm amazed.
At first I was worried and overwhelmed but I persisted and I'm glad I did so.
I came to realize that the Nvidia proprietary are evil and shouldn't be used, I had so many problems it wasn't funny.
-wrong resolution
-wrong aspect ratio
-wrong dpi
and the list goes on.
Today I tried Manjaro and I think that it's great, it is almost as fast as arch but easy enough for a plebeian to install it.
One thing i'm loving is pacman, it is so easy to install packages its quite absurd and an endless sea of free amazing software to boot!
Wine is quite impressive also I didn't know you could run windows programs in a DE like you can it is very nice.
Currently my favourite DE/WE is MATE and open-box is probably second, I still have to try enlightenment and amazing and an other impressive aspect is the speed! I can't believe the speed!
I feel that I have learnt a lot and wish to continue doing so.
I also run arch my raspberry pi and it is equally impressive.
I was formerly a big fan of Linux Mint Debian Edition, mostly because of the Cinnamon DE and the fact that all the proprietary codecs work out of the box (flash, mp3, etc.). A week ago or so I decided to try once again to move to Arch Linux, because I really wanted the experience. I couldn't get the wireless card to work, though, no matter what I tried.
After looking around a little bit more, I tried Mageia, which also didn't work, and then I moved to Manjaro XFCE. Wireless card works, Arch-based, *and* like Linux Mint, it has proprietary codec support, as well as a slew of other software pre-installed. One example is Steam, which I have never seen pre-installed on an OS besides SteamOS. I think I only ended up installing two other programs (so far, anyways). I love the system and aesthetics, and just may have replaced LMDE as my favorite desktop OS.
I haven't tried OpenBox, yet, though - I might check that out soon.
Awesome success story, but since you said you are practically yearning for more, here's some food for thought.
I'm always hopping around distros, but no matter what I do to larger dirstros like mint, fedora, chakra, manjaro, ubuntu, etc I can't get them to run NEARLY as fast as when I take bone-stock arch, debian, or redhat with NO GUI, just a package manager and a multiuser interface (init 2), and build up from there. It's much more work, but it's worth it. You have to get all those proprietary codecs, those additional repos, those lovely added command-line tools, plamsa extensions, you name it, but dear god does it move mountains.
First time I installed linux was on a powermac 9500 when I was 8 (I'm 23 now), and I had to start with the kernel and a c compiler. It's intimidating work I'll admit, but I learned SO much.
Give it a try. The whole idea behind linux is freedom. If you don't like a distro, you can gut it and reshape it to whatever you want. Use that to your advantage. :)
install and run the smxi script from the terminal. Your graphics problems / mulitmedia problems / and prolly some others you dont know you have - will go bye-bye.