I swear this thread is giving me flashbacks to distro fights on USENET in the 90's. No joke, it made me dig out my Stone Temple Pilot CDs.

I used Arch Linux for a few months, until I was driven to read the BIOS manual to find out how to enable legacy BIOS mode. For me, personally, I'm with Slackware for the long haul. I do a lot of music-related things, and I have the flexibility to set up my Slackware install any way I need. You can do so with Arch, but it's a pain. Also, I need stability--if something works in the morning, it's got to work at night. I don't have time to figure out what blew up when everything I need was updated in a rolling release. Not updating means things break. I need things not to break, so I stick with Slackware.

1 members found this post helpful.

Indeed. Slackware works for me. If it ain't broke don't fix it. it is all good.

I was using Arch for about 8-9 months, back to 2012. It was a rather pleasant experience. Having said that, i am not planning to use again Arch in the foreseen future.
The reasons? First of all, i am not very sold in the idea of having the "latest and the greatest" so there is no real need to run a bleeding edge distro. Next, running archlinux demands a lot of time -i mean "a lot" for my preferences :reading the blog and the forum before upgrading, making appropriate adjustments if needed etc..
I do not like the idea of a script based installation, but this is minor from a practical point of view -after all, you install once.
Last but not least, systemd nonsense.
Slackware now, offers me a really stable system but not filled with archaic packages, and i beileve it gives me more freedom. I am using my machines without constantly changes or any kind of surprises, it helps me learn linux with my own pace, no dependency resolution, i can easily choose which version of a program to use -for example the stock KDE 4.10.5 or alienbob's 4.12.5? Lyx 2.0x from slackbuilds or 2.1 using the source from the official site? Kernel 3.10.17 or a custom one -and in any case, you will not be asked for an upgrade here every single month.

See Arch compared to other distributions.

PS They say:So true... And that applies to many other topics IMO.

2 members found this post helpful.

Are you suggesting that leetist Arch users employ a script such as this? -

1 members found this post helpful.

I don't think that this comparison really applies here, since the manual usually comes for free with the software in question, one just has to look at it. I personally see nothing wrong with a RTFM answer if the answer is in the fine manual. Of course said in a nice way. After all I (and I think we as community) expect that the OP of a thread has made his homework before asking and looking into the manual should be the first thing everyone is doing when something doesn't work.

Leave out the F'ing F, OK?

I am an Arch user at this moment in time, its installed on my eeePC701-4G and my main home desktop. However, when i first started using GNU/Linux I tried SuSe, Mandrake and Redhat RPM based "beginners" distros. The first down and dirty distro I tried was Slackware back around version 7/8.

I use Arch at the moment because i want to get a feel for "new" linux rolling release systems. I prefer distros that trust the user to get their hands dirty from time to time. As such i have experience of Debian (mainly in server environments), Gentoo, FreeBSD and even tried to get involved with LFS but that wasn't too successful.

I try to keep an open mind, I have Slack64 14 in a VM just to keep tabs on things. As far as my opinion on Archlinux from a daily user point of view, its a good relatively stable system considering its bleeding edge rolling release state. As long as you make sure that before you run pacman -Syu you give the Archlinux site a quick check to ensure that none of the updates require some user input everything runs smoothly.

The Arch documentation, namely the wiki is second to none. So much information and almost every possibility covered. With that being said I have found that there is a large proportion of the Arch community whether on the official Arch forums, IRC or elsewhere that have such an elitist attitude that many posts/responses are unhelpful or just plain rude. This unfortunately pushes some newer users away who are willing to learn, but then on the other hand the RTFM rule generally isnt adhered to :P

As for Slackware, its a great system. I havent really came across any problems with it other than the usual newb errors while compiling custom kernels, setting up network cards (in the early days) and some configuration files but all of these have been due to my personal ability and misreading or misunderstanding information found online. I havent had any issues with Slackware communities online and I would say that 99% of them are willing to help in anyway they can.

I have been using Arch for the past 3 years maybe and thus far it works well, i only have a couple of problems with it such as systemd. In all honestly however, I do see myself switching at least my desktop over to Slackware full time and keeping Arch on the eeePC or buying another older desktop to play around with it on. I have found myself working on a custom desktop configuration that I currently use on Arch and if I can replicate my light weight system, with openbox and pypanel and other cosmetic tweaks i will save the configs and make the change.

It is in my opinion that as much as i like Arch... Slackware > Arch

I had always thought that I wanted to find the perfect rolling release distro. I tried arch and really liked it, but don't want to have to constantly upgrade.

Then I was determined to learn slackware and fell i love with it. I may try other distros on occasion, but always come back to slack.

Now it's more a question of what is the best desktop environment? I like the way xfce is lightweight and I like kde for its wallpaper slideshow.

My new favorite DE under Linux is KDE now. However, I think the Windows's desktop environment (whatever they call it) is much more comfortable. And no, I am not trolling. I do enjoy Windows 8.1 DE.

I agree. The metro/modern interface isn't bad at all

Actually i am talking more about the taskbar, it is great, I can access almost every part of the system from there, pin my most used apps etc. It is very comfortable and it also looks great. And I don' mind the metro/modern stuff.

The Metro UI isn't that bad. People complain about it, but it's just a different UI and it works the same way.

Not saying I wish UNIX had a UI as such, but it would be interesting to say the least.

Someones got mad. Please, use all LQ. I'm quit.

@Mods : You know what, they make LQ useless. All Linux, isn't it?

On a side note: for the last couple of weeks, I've been fiddling with Elementary OS, a highly original distribution based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. The distro has its own window manager, Pantheon, and I must say in all honesty that this is the most usable interface I've ever come across. I've written a blog article about it:

http://kikinovak.wordpress.com/2014/...etits-oignons/

I'm currently running it on my laptop, and it not only works great, but also has that "Wow!" look. It's surprisingly light on resources, and the only bug I've yet come across in two weeks is a wrong argument in the rpcbind startup script that spews out a benign error in /var/log/boot.log when using NFS. Everything else JustWorks(tm).

Cheers,

Niki