hi ive been looking for a new distro. the overload of userfreindliness and bulk of ubuntu stinks and unstability of debian sid is too much. i think arch is the answer. ive installed gentoo before and liked it. but the thing that worries me is the confusion of the devfs filesystem (causes problems with /dev/hda is /dev/part/part1...), stability, and pacman. someone please tell me how stable it is, if arch still uses devfs, and just what problems it has.

No, Arch doesn't use devfs anymore.

It's considered a bleeding edge distro when it comes to software updates, so if you like to keep things updated all the time, you might experience some breakage now and then. The latest thing to break some systems is the new xorg 7.0 that just went into the current repo.

Pacman is great and I like it far better than apt-get, or emerge.

If you think you might be interested in Arch, you should make a backup of your current system and then try it, as it's quick to install and costs nothing other than the blank CD you record the ISO onto. If you don't like it, you can always restore your backup quickly enough.

ozar

Thanks to the switch to Xorg 7, there are a few broken packages and things are a little bit more chaotic in ArchLinux land. This will probably have settled down in a week or two; normally it's pretty stable and solid.

DevFS has been completely abandoned (inevitably, since it isn't in the kernel any more anyway), and not a moment too soon.

Pacman's a great package manager. It doesn't have some of the really crazy features that the new versions of APT have, but it does what it does very well. And the repos are fairly carefully maintained, too, which helps.

Another thing...Arch being bleeding-edge...things tend to break a lot

udev was breaking on and off for a while
and now xorg7 is starting to be a headache for a lot of users