> Do you use Arch yourself? > And if so, for how long? Long time listener, etc...
I've used it for at least a year on my eee 701. I run minimal install with no window manager. Openbox with manual 'startx', and all programs on keybinds, with feh to set background, conky and htop/ntop for stats. Uptime shows ~18s with everything going, and boots into ~45meg of ram. It takes a good day to install if you haven't used /etc/rc.* files before, and weeks of occasional tinkering, but the customise is worth the effort. Arch makes no assumptions. It forces you to custom build for your environment, and it pays off. My 900mhz (underclocked to 630mhz by factory default), boots fast, performs fast (considered package selection helps also (ie. abiword/gnumeric over openoffice, or kazehakase/midori/some chromium variant over firefox). It does whatever you build it to do, and gives incredible satisfaction from that. Pacman (package management) is a tar.gz package manager written in C. It's fast, and a very shallow learning curve away from apt-get for the average ubuntu user. The rolling release model is a trade-off for stability (I use debian lenny on my server), but not installing fresh or having to deal with an apt-get dist-upgrade is nice (perhaps it has improved since I've used it, but a system upgrade will always be messy). It's made command line fun for me. And being able to use vi, at least a little bit, definitely helps on a foreign system, or when you don't have a display or a mouse... -- Chris Darby
