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Comment by ElliotH | Hacker News Reader

My favorite thing about running on an Arch system is I know what's going on all the time. If an Ubuntu system breaks I'm generally dealing with a mass of preinstalled things, it's hard to know what's relevant.

Similarly for increasing boot speed, I really like knowing exactly what I need to be running at any one time.

I appreciate it's not for everyone, but I imagine most coders around here who run a Linux system would benefit a lot by taking the time to set up an install and having it work how they like.

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I was running Gentoo before. In Gentoo, you could configure everything up to the smallest details, and you had the system that worked exactly as you want it too. The cost was frequent recompiles and a bunch of time lost playing with the things.

After I swithced to Arch, I found it much easier to configure, and it required almost no maintenance. It is a great balance between ease of use and full power.

Have you found a difference in freshness of packages since you switched? I really like how in Arch packages tend to be much more up to date than other distros ( a side effect of the rolling release)

Gentoo had slightly fresher packages (I was running ~x86). But, arch packages are in principle more stable. I haven't had any major breakage with Arch for a few years now, while with Gentoo it was a norm to have breakages every month until I finally switched off.

I was under the impression that the situation was reversed. My Gentoo systems have been very stable because I take many of the masked package guidelines seriously (of course not all). Meanwhile you have Arch that changed the default python version to 3 back in October 2010 that hosed a lot of people's systems. Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1808840 and my favorite quote (there are so many great ones though) from the mess:

20:20 <dash> well that confirms my impression that arch was invented by a bunch of guys who thought gentoo was too stable and easy to use

Getting through the initial hurdles of getting wifi working and daemonized, getting X to start when you boot (if you want to run X), etc. can take a little time because it's not something you normally have to think about with the preinstalled distros. But once you get through those things it's pretty smooth sailing. Pacman is fantastic, and AUR is unmatched. The benefit of knowing exactly what is running is worth the initial pain.

I would never go away from running releases, its fantastic I have my laptop since quite some years now and since I did the install I never had a real problem with keeping it going.

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