Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Wed 3rd Nov 2004 07:07 UTC
To paraphrase one of the best "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episodes, "Best of Both Worlds", both Arch Linux and Slackware represent the best of all the OS worlds: the power of traditional Unix, the elegance of BSD and the ease of mind of Mac OS X. This is an article outlining the differences between --what I believe-- are the two best Linux distros around today. Mind you though, "best" doesn't always mean "easy".
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I have been running Arch since February. The system with ABS and Pacman is VERY nice, but the packages are not always that great. Especially KDE, Xorg and glibc are packages that frequently cause pain. Even though they say they have a separate testing repository, Current/Extra IS testing. Of course, if I see pacman -Syu offers new packages I by experience know will have to be re-packaged two or three times before works, I rather skip the update and check forums untill things look calm.
A lot of Arch's package problems probably come from a rather small userbase: Too few people to actually USE the "testing" repository.
Small and more obscure things are often overlooked. E.g. KDE-Bluetooth is not to be found, and the encryption-support in KMail is simpy not there (Something about a package being compiled without support for gpgagent).
But then again, the system itself is great. If I want to rebuild kmail, I can just modify a text file and run makepkg.