Why I use Arch Linux

I have been an Arch Linux for a while now, and I am still liking it.

Here's the good side of it:

• It's small (one CD)
• It's simple (it comes with very little)
• It has a decent package selection (if you consider AUR, more about that later)
• It uses pretty much unpatched upstream software
• It's a binary distro (except for AUR. Again, more about it later)
• It's pretty stable (no crashes I can remember)
• It has rolling releases (unlike, say, Fedora or Debian)
• It's easy to keep updated (like all of them nowadays)
• It's not ideologically dogmatic, but pragmatic (yes, there are NVidia drivers, and test-drive games, and whatever)
• It doesn't seem to be a one-guy joint

And the bad side:

• Updates sometimes break things (about twice a year)
• Admin tools are between unexistant and disjointed

And of course, there is the very very good side: AUR

AUR is a comunity repository. And there is a rather large community. And packaging things for Arch is so easy, and putting things in AUR is so simple, even I find time to contribute (my packages).

And it's a calm community, and pretty much, instead of compiling my random unknown packages for myself, I save the steps to build them and stick them in a PKGBUILD and upload them. Takes two minutes for most things.

It's a throwback to the old days of Linux: quiet, competent (or learning) people doing things, sharing, you use them, you give back... I had not felt that way with a distro for years.