I have been an Arch Lin­ux for a while now, and I am still lik­ing it.

Here's the good side of it:

• It's small (one CD)

• It's sim­­ple (it comes with very lit­tle)

• It has a de­­cent pack­­age se­lec­­tion (if you con­sid­er AUR, more about that lat­er)

• It us­es pret­­ty much un­­patched up­­stream soft­­ware

• It's a bi­­na­ry dis­­tro (ex­­cept for AUR. Again, more about it lat­er)

• It's pret­­ty sta­ble (no crash­es I can re­mem­ber)

• It has rolling re­leas­es (un­­like, say, Fe­­do­ra or De­bian)

• It's easy to keep up­­­dat­ed (like all of them nowa­­days)

• It's not ide­o­log­i­­cal­­ly dog­­mat­ic, but prag­­mat­ic (yes, there are NVidia driver­s, and test-­­drive games, and what­ev­er)

• It does­n't seem to be a one-guy joint

And the bad side:

• Up­­­dates some­­times break things (about twice a year)

• Ad­min tools are be­tween un­ex­is­­tant and dis­­join­t­ed

And of course, there is the very very good side: AUR

AUR is a co­mu­ni­ty repos­i­to­ry. And there is a rather large com­mu­ni­ty. And pack­ag­ing things for Arch is so easy, and putting things in AUR is so sim­ple, even I find time to con­trib­ute (my pack­ages).

And it's a calm com­mu­ni­ty, and pret­ty much, in­stead of com­pil­ing my ran­dom un­known pack­ages for my­self, I save the steps to build them and stick them in a PKG­BUILD and up­load them. Takes two min­utes for most things.

It's a throw­back to the old days of Lin­ux: qui­et, com­pe­tent (or learn­ing) peo­ple do­ing things, shar­ing, you use them, you give back­... I had not felt that way with a dis­tro for years.