Archbang without a shadow of a doubt was heavenly upon my stumbling on it. It gave a shortcut approach for people wanting arch and its speed functionalities minus too much time spent reading wiki.

Pros:
Wireless were detected right away while in the live-install environment. The openbox desktop along with conky and menus looked gorgeous and yet light.
At end of install you are given a gui desktop, not just cli environment.
Default apps were great.
The system was well put together (close to crunchbang)

Cons:
The installer should include option for using same user accounts as in dare I say Ubuntu/Mepis/Mint. I have to create a different user every install.
There should be a script that automagically updates pacman to the most up to date pacman mirror and pacman version.

A gui front end for pacman would be nice as was done in chakra (another arch derivative. The front-ends on arch wiki are not so easy to install and use from the AUR.

ABS/AUR is still a little tricky to work with (install rare community packages) even with the wiki.

Windows partition should also be automatically detected and provided as an option when booting up after install.

Slim is a nice choice for login manager, but I replaced that quickly with Gdm as it makes adding and/or login into other desktop environments easier.


Having said all these, archbang is one of the best distros I have ever used. And their faults stream from archlinux itself. But archlinux and archbang are wonderful nonetheless.

pacman -Syu should sync and run flawlessly consistently without having to do mild troubleshooting. The wiki and archlinux community is quick to spot these things and come up with solutions.

Once you master arch, it becomes difficult to go back to some handholding, bloated systems.

The developers of archbang paid great attention to detail on this distro. The themes for openbox, wireless just working flawlessly and consistently on all desktop environments (KDE, gnome)without much hassle, etc.

It is very good for advanced and intermediate users looking to have a speedy, functional, and customizable system.