Ever since I heard about Arch Linux, I have been itching to try it. Especially since the package manager is so cool. However, when I tried mainstream Arch, I heard how hard it was to configure. There was no desktop; you had to know how to type commands. Sure, that may be easy to Slackware users, but for me, at first I found out that when I tried to boot from a partitioned USB key it was a real pain. Same from an external CD drive. Then, I tried using the hybrid ISO as it was intended. I was able to successfully boot, but then I had trouble getting wpa_supplicant to recognize my network adapter. After reading the man pages, there is no way to specify which adapter to use.

Fine, so I try to configure the network adapter, and the wpa_supplicant daemon fails to connect. So I reboot into my Ubuntu installation, and, lo and behold, there are no networks listed! Wpa_supplicant has borked my network adapter! Thankfully, clicking "Connect to hidden wireless network" fixed the problem.

Those problems aside, I read this thread, and settled on the perfect alternative: ArchBang. After booting the CD, I was able to successfully connect to the wireless network and successfully install the system. It comes with Openbox preinstalled, as well as Conky and a few useful apps (Chromium, GNOME Office). I installed GNOME on it, and am currently upgrading my packages. Now, I am enjoying posting from my new ArchBang system, and I look forward to my new GNOME desktop that I recently installed (Sorry, Openbox is a little hard to use).

I'm very glad to hear that you enjoy using another distribution. I was sure that you would never move away from Ubuntu.

+1.

Congratulations on a) taking responsibility for solving your own problems and b) not being afraid to try something new.

Yeah, but he liked LMDE and Fedora also and got back to Ubuntu somewhat fast. I wonder if it is different this time.

What made me go back to Ubuntu those two times were package management breaks. In LMDE, an upgrade attempted to remove half my system (thank God I removed it), and with Fedora (Rawhide) I ran into more dependency problems. From what I hear, Arch's package manager doesn't break as easily.

In LMDE I saw your screenshot, you mixed the Testing and Unstable repositories, then added the Experimental repo and at last tried to mix it with Ubuntu's PPAs. That can hardly be considered the fault of Debian's package management.
Same with Fedora, Rawhide is a development platform, it is supposed to break at times.

Well from what I understand, the reason I switched to ArchBang is because of package management, which is high on my list of priorities in regards to unbreakability. That being such as that if an upgrade occurs it's supposed to upgrade, not remove half the system.

From what I understand from this article, Bodhi Linux did the same thing to many Bodhi users that LMDE tried to do to me (and would have if I didn't type 'N' at the apt-get prompt).

If you wildly mix repos, the package manager tries to resolve the conflicts that occur (you know, dependency-resolving). If an installation of two incompatible will break your system, the solution of this is to uninstall one of the packages. But that can result in a broken system, too, if there are packages that depend on the removed package, so they are also removed. Things get worse in regards to meta-packages.
But this is not a fault of the package-management system. At first it is a result of wildly mixing repos (especially when you mix Ubuntu and Debian, they are simply not compatible), at second it is because how the developers/maintainers implement their dependencies.

But if you find your solution with Archbang, fine, use it. Arch is a fine system, runs fine here, but same as with debian, I prefer the original.
Now going to install Slackware and see package management from a whole different point of view.

And what about Bodhi? From what I understand, the upgrade on the LMDE system tried to upgrade a bunch of video drivers. And according to the article I linked to previously (which I know you replied to the Syndicated News thread for it), trying to upgrade xserver-xorg-video-geode ended up breaking entire Bodhi systems. Both of these situations seem similar to me.

If you have read that article you would know why that has happened. Because they have mixed the original Ubuntu repo with their own, and had conflicts. Developers fault, not that of apt, as Jeff Hogland has stated, he corrected that package and the bug was fixed.