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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Good article and fun to read. IMO, comparisons are always more interesting than single distro reviews.
Arch is a very promising little distro but it still needs to mature in many respects. (Well, it isn't even version 1.0 yet.) Arch needs to develop a larger user community, more packages and a GUI frontend for the pacman package manager (it's awkward having to search available packages via web browser).
If one considers only the available packages, FreeBSD's ports system beats both Slackware and Arch (or any Linux distro, in fact). The amount of packages in FreeBSD's ports is amazing and they are also kept more up-to-date than in Linux distros. Too bad I don't like compiling from source. So my choice is still Debian Unstable.
But I'm going to check out Arch every time they make a new release. One day Arch may become a better option for desktop use than FreeBSD and Debian Unstable.