Since my last reply to this thread, I have now standardized everything on Arch. Currently running with KDE 4.3.3.

So far, everything is stable, and things are as good or better than any other distro I have used.

What brought me to Arch (several years ago) was simplicity, plus--hands down--the best package management scheme on the planet. The only downside is that it takes some patience to slog through setting everything up. (Arch starts with **nothing**, and you have to install all manner of things that would be built in on other distros.)

I dropped Arch's KDE after openSUSE 11.2 came out. Now using Arch with xmonad. very fast and stable indeed.

Never heard of xmonad, but ran pacman -Sl and there it is!!

What's the connection between OpenSUSE 11.2 and dropping KDE?

i have stayed away from gentoo for the very reason posted in that blog. It seems unnecessary on modern hardware. modern hardware. I also agree that arch's pacman is the best package management. rivaled by FreeBSD, of course. this is LinuxQuestions, though, right? not that any distros package management is really "that" different. for some reason I get a different feeling of watching pacman work. maybe it is the different configurations one can use. I am writing this from within sidux, though. i do like sidux a lot. very easy to use, I guess. and gives me a little more confidence of stability than just straight sid. for rolling releases, I prefer arch. maybe for the pure fact that you do start with nothing. whatever gets built up over time that would be cleaned out by a six month release was actually put there by you. it does take patience at first, but arch seems to have a very helpful community. very unlike when i first switched to linux way back. greeted with the "if you don't know it you shouldn't be here" attitude. things have changed, but it made me appreciate the BSDs way more at the time.

xmonad is a tiling window manager.
openSUSE 11.2 has the best KDE implementation ever made. Complete KDE-Firefox and KDE-openoffice integration ootb. openSUSE is also very famous in KDE forums, as they stick true to the KDE releases and backports a lot of KDE features, other distros remove a lot KDE stuffs for various reasons. openSUSE specializes and puts a lot of effort towards their KDE releases. Just like ubuntu gives gnome more preference and kubuntu just feels half-baked, just put out there for the sake of it. openSUSE and Mandriva actually care about their KDE releases, like ubuntu and fedora care for Gnome.
For more info.

Well i did check out fore sight linux... it seems to be a rolling distro that is perfect for newbies... considering that the installation process for most rolling distros tend to be complicated.....

But i would love to go the hard way... so that i can learn some of the linux "internals"... So i am back to the gentoo or Arch question... Maybe i ll go with both arch and gentoo on a virtual machine...

Well... how easy is it to use arch/gentoo in an environment without internet?? can we install a manually downloaded package easily?? or is it overly dependent on internet??

By the way can a package manager be installed in slackware???

Slackware already has package management.

Sorry i meant dependency management....

I use Arch and Sidux ... Really, I've tried many distro's, these are the fastest and most responsive distro's I've used to date.

Well... how easy is it to use arch/gentoo in an environment without internet?? can we install a manually downloaded package easily?? or is it overly dependent on internet??

You can manually download packages and then install them from cache.

Like to know more about that.... can u point me to a tutorial?

Well, you will need a computer with interet access. Install Arch on it. Setup that system completely. Then you can take backup of all the cached packages and install it in another computer. Read a bit about pacman here:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman and http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman_Tips

On the same note what is the diff between makepkg and ABS?? Both seems to do the same thing... build packages from source.