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Comment by foomanchu | Hacker News Reader

How robust is Arch? I am tempted to move from Ubuntu for the packaging system but I had bad experiences with Gentoo several years ago which makes me place a high value on keeping a working system without much maintenance or troubleshooting.

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The core (i.e., non-AUR stuff) is pretty tock-solid. I switched from Gentoo to Arch a while ago, and the ease with which Arch can be managed is phenomenal.

I want an OS that:

* works

* stays the way I left it

* won't do things behind my back

* has a lot of packages for stuff that don't need to be built from source

Arch qualifies, Ubuntu doesn't qualify, Gentoo doesn't, Windows doesn't, and Mac OS X doesn't. If you're a user like me, Arch is for you.

For those reading this to pick up info, Slackware qualifies for all four points (depending on how big you mean for a lot), as does any of the BSDs.

How many times has an upgrade broken something?

Debian:

`apt-get install apt-listchanges apt-listbugs etckeeper`

Done.

Arch became stable. The package manager Pacman is mature. The advantage with Arch it's that you don't have to compile every packages from the sources, as Gentoo does, so it's faster, and easier to maintain. Arch absolutely worth a try. Only package from AUR needed to be compile, but it's for more specific package. For example, kernel, xorg, Gnome and so on are available with pacman as binary.

The question is not whether the package manager itself is stable but what degree of quality assurance is present in the packages themselves and in interdependencies between packages. I was always afraid to run "emerge world" because of how often it would break my system.

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