I been with mint since I think 2011, I only left when they got rid of the tablet support for wacom or was working on it as I need that for my work, it's back and working good so I am back. (well the graphical part needs some work compared to gnome 3 but it works good enough for my purpose.)
I tried a bunch of distros, hate unity an not a fan of gnome 3 tablet look.
I absolutely love arch though as much as mint, but for a workstation I have to go with mint, it allows me to mess up my desktop and if it isn't cinnamon then it has to be xfce for me because of that one reason.
But the difference between arch and mint for me is everything works out of the box for me with mint, arch flies but there is some things I can't use or have to fork certain things to force them to work, such as intel xdk which I use for my html5 stuff they have a aur version but I had to change a dependency for a lib and create a fake gtk2 dummy package to get it to even load (can't be bothered I just need it to work), my scanner I need to load in gimpers it doesn't in arch but I am sure I can find a way if I had time as it doesn't use sane (which I don't) plus a few other issues, BUT I love arch, the speed and the ability to make it what I want with no bloat, so for surfing its arch, for working it's mint because it just works without spending hours figuring out how to get certain programs to work correctly that I need.
Clem and the team actually listen to users and do a great job with a small team and now they have tablet support again
I'm be back to stay.
Plus I have fun making mdm themes in my spare time, it's a fun distraction.
and I wouldn't use windows if you paid me to, I just hate it period.