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Comment by ericcoleman | Hacker News Reader

It's really just up to what your personal preferences are, mostly related to packaging and setup.

I've been using ArchLinux for a while, but have been slowly moving to stock debian.

Out of curiosity, why are you stepping away from Arch? The move to stock Debian suggests it might be the ease of spinning up identical systems on EC2 or the equivalent.

I like Arch, but it takes a while to get configured. It seems more suited to an installation that is going to be highly customized anyway, so starting from scratch makes sense.

I run arch on my laptop and you are definitely right. It took me days to configure everything and that required having a 2nd computer available to search things. However, it did teach me a lot about terminal and how things worked compared to installing Ubuntu. Another downfall is when something breaks during an upgrade. However, 90% of the time the solution is on the Arch news site.

There are a lot of reason why I love it though. Very quick boot time on a spinning disk and small memory foot print when running. I run awesome wm (window tiling manager) which is great for coding with a small laptop screen.

I am not sure if I would run it on a production server though.

You nailed it, configuration management. Getting a little difficult managing the Arch servers in production, making sure updates are safe, etc.

Most of our developers seem more comfortable with ubuntu/debian than Arch as well.

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