Slackware and Debian are nowhere near as current as Arch, and don't have anything near comparable to the AUR.
The main downside of Arch is that you want to be updating somewhat regularly (every couple months at max). This isn't an issue for desktops/laptop I regularly use, and I run Arch on my home server that gets updated around monthly, but it's not a "set and (almost) forget" like Debian stable or CentOS.
EDIT: I run Arch on my work laptop and my home server (which runs my blog and some services) and it's never fallen over in several years. Occasionally updates will require me to do something, but if there's an update that requires manual intervention they post about it on archlinux.org.
[1] https://github.com/majewsky/system-configuration/blob/master...
The lack of layers of configuration is subjectively simpler and clearer for me. It rather read 'man someprogram.conf' and use 'vi' than try to understand how some other package generates its configuration file.
Yes, it's not as stable. Sometimes stuff breaks. I'd rather fix it now than later.
Also not having many prescribed defaults is sometimes nice. I want KDE with that display manager / lockscreen. And I can have it without uninstalling some metapackage which will make updates harder in the future. (like gnome-desktop on Ubuntu)
I haven't used slack for over a decade, so can't really comment.
Also until recently it was one of the few distros with nicely integrated grsec kernel. :-(
And you feel that's a good thing?
The AUR has pretty much everything, community maintained. The arch build system makes it trivial to package something no matter where it comes from. You can use it to repackage a .deb or a .rpm (it'll even download it from its official home and verify checksums), or a project from a git repo, for specific releases, or tracking a branch, or what have you.
There's all kinds of software on the AUR and it's all up to date. The official repos also move very fast, compared to other distros.
Read about a new feature in a recent version of some software you use? Just update, it's probably already landed in arch. You don't have to wait six months for a release window to install software that's already ready.
I didn't say "official community repo", but "community repo", because I don't know about Arch.
Then you're calling this repo which I must not name community repo "community-maintained". So it is a community repo.
All while people in this thread advertise for Arch because this community non-community repo is so awesome. But when things break people are not allowed to take it into account.
If you try to lure people with this AUR, at least own its failures, not only its successes.
I simply find it remarkable that someone actually chose this failure for his advertising. There are certainly many instances of quick turnaround times that don't center on failure.
AUR steam was missing dependencies in a way that specific installed apps weren't functioning right, but that's not something you could figure out from the binary itself. For example Portal depended on texture compression which wasn't included by default. Without buying everything in the Steam store you wouldn't know that.
The good thing was that it was corrected within a day. How long does a typical distro bug report take, before it's even looked at?
I guess I got lucky though. A turnaround time that short for community projects also depends on whether the contributor in question happens to be at his desk at that point.
As you said, you could get grsec in any distro by recompiling kernel. In Arch it was available immediately as a package. People took care of updating it / applying the new releases.
Just install it yourself. I don't get what the big deal is. If you have to edit a bunch of config files then just do it yourself. If you want something straight forward there are better options. If you want something closer to traditional *NIX there are better options. If Arch is your thing that's cool, but as an oldish (41) Linux user that's been using Linux primarily since the late 90's I'm not sure what Arch is going for. I'm not trying to be harsh, but honestly I just don't quite get what Arch is doing. It seems to introduce an added level of complexity that specific to Arch. If your into that sort of thing, there's better options. If your looking for something easier there's better options. I just don't get it. lol
It may not be for you. I ended up packaging new libraries every few weeks on other distros. Debian experimental included. Arch solves that problem for me. I guess Gentoo, nixos, and others would do that as well. But this one's my choice.
I'm not saying that Debian is hopelessly overengineered. All the complexity is there for a reason, because Debian strives to cover 100% of what everyone needs. Arch is content with achieving 95%, if it means that you can avoid a huge part of the complexity that comes from catching the last 5%.
For example, some Debian packages use a dialog system to set themselves up during installation. Arch avoids that complexity and instead expects the user to read the wiki on how to configure the application in question.
Plus, makepkg is awesome. If, say, I need a specific font installed, I have no trouble with whipping out a short PKGBUILD that downlads, checks, and installs the files - providing me with the option to manage it using Pacman.
Its simplicity seems so essential to me that I can't imagine why there are so few distros providing tools like it.
Arch is actually much _easier_ to maintain afterwards (once installed and configured) than almost anything else. This is because it does not add layers of useless abstraction, very much unlike DEB and RPM based distros. Packages are very close to upstream, with only minimal patches when really necessary, unlike RPM/DEB distros which heavily customize and patch most packages. Packages are also very easy to create, you can learn to do that in minutes, again very much unlike DEB and RPM which are needlessly overengineered and have whole ecosystems of helper scripts aiming to help with that complexity, but you have to spend a lot of time to actually learn them as well.
Compared to when I use Ubuntu, have to upgrade every 6 months and suddenly I got headache because all custom configuration doesn't work anymore or custom repository doesn't work anymore because the maintainer is missing.
Slackware is fine, but Patrick and a bunch of guys is only a small team, and custom package can only do so much. Bless him and may Guinness always flow freely.
Debian is problematic, because their libraries are usually old.
Unless, of course, you add a public PPA that randomly stops working in the future and/or will screw up your next distupgrade.
That said, when setting up machines for others I pick the current LTS release of Kubuntu and install unattended-upgrades to ensure security updates get maintained. It provides a much better ongoing maintenance story for machines that are less "pets" and more "tools".
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Due to a disk crash, I recently had to reinstall Arch for the first time in quite a few years. IMO the install process has become more opaque. I seem to remember the wiki use to have a newbie install guide which was really helpful and explained a lot of things as you go, or at least what the common practices were or the pros and cons of different options. That seems to be gone and anything that may be an opinion seems to be excised from any install instructions, and you're left to stumble around different pages a lot more, which is a bit of a shame.
Most other distros you download a pre-built OS, and then you remove all the stuff you don't want. And add stuff you do want.
With Arch you just add all the things you want. You know exactly what is installed, and where/how it is configured because you did it yourself.
It's also much easier to switch between DE and/or WM with Arch than most distros.
I can't speak for other Arch users but to me, selecting it as my primary OS has been a natural evolution. I first cut my teeth on OpenBSD. Probably not the best choice, but it was the late 90s when I was first exposed to Unix-like OSes, and a friend of mine was something of an OpenBSD evangelist at the time. I then migrated to FreeBSD, and later (around 2005?) to Gentoo. I tried numerous other distros around that period and never really found one I liked (one that felt, well, BSD-ish) more than Gentoo. I admit I only dabbled in Slackware, but Gentoo made more sense to my BSD-addled mind--perhaps because portage was at least passingly analogous to the ports collection, which I still very much admire.
Of course, having to rebuild literally everything on the system or use unofficial binary overlays just for binary packages grew increasingly more frustrating, particularly for desktop use, and I lamented about this on Slashdot many years ago. A kind soul suggested Arch and persuaded me to try it, suggesting that it was close enough to Gentoo that I may enjoy it. I did, and I've been using it ever since--probably for about 5-6 years. I suspect its relative similarity to Gentoo has probably changed with systemd--for better and worse--but one of the things that's simultaneously both very exciting and frustrating is Arch's constant evolution. I can honestly say that's definitely for the better.
It is still possible to build a minimal system in Arch fairly easily, so I'm not quite sure I follow why this may not qualify as "barebones." I'll grant that the absolute minimal base image "out of the box" will still weigh in around 330-360 megs, but I have had limited success reducing that footprint for abusing containers via custom builds (I seem to recall it was necessary to remove the Perl dependency in OpenSSL to shave off a fairly sizable chunk--that may not be true anymore).
The other side of the coin is that it's similar enough to Gentoo (with PKGBUILDs) that you can very quickly build your own custom packages, but it's also a binary rolling release system which gives you access to fairly new things relatively quickly. I'm aware there's also Aptosid, but I'm not a huge fan of Debian-based distros for my own personal use (preference, mostly).
If I had to wager a bet, I think a good chunk of Arch users post 2012 are in the same boat as me. They're recovering Gentoo users. Therein may perhaps be a better answer.
> As an outside observer it seems needlessly complicated and most of the complexity being specific to Arch.
Ostensibly, that may seem true until you scratch the surface. One of the things that's important to understand about Arch is that its maintainers ship upstream packages with minimal changes. Everything you receive is more or less packaged as the developer intended. This can lead to some inconveniences if you want things mostly preconfigured (or configured through an ncurses GUI), but I'd submit that the Arch wiki is absolutely fantastic answer to this. It is this design choice that follows, at least spiritually, with the BSDs and Gentoo, and is also one of the reasons why Debian/Ubuntu's default decision to start services immediately after installation (MySQL, etc) without providing the option to configure first befuddles me.
The other side of the coin is that at least some of that complexity isn't strictly due to Arch-specific choices as much as it is these defaults I mentioned. The init system is entirely systemd with no overlays and no compatibility layers outside what systemd itself provides. Once you learn pacman and how to use PKGBUILDs there really isn't anything that deviates substantially from any other systemd-based distro. I'll agree there are some sharp corners here and there, sometimes due to choices made during upgrades/migrations (OpenSSL's recent update comes to mind), but I suspect at least some of your observations may simply be due to what you're familiar with versus what Arch provides.
Out of curiosity, what is it that you feel is "needlessly complicated?"
Please don't take me as being contrarian! I just happen to really like Arch. I'm also fond of Gentoo and FreeBSD, and begrudgingly use Ubuntu for situations its better suited for, because sometimes you don't want to upgrade to the newest version of a package (Arch's recent OpenSSL bump from 1.0.2 to 1.2.x can cause some issues).
Anyway, I appreciate your opinions! Everyone's different and has different preferences for different reasons (past experiences, patience levels, familiarity, etc)--and that's a good thing! Arch certainly isn't for everyone, but I think it fills the rolling release without long build cycles (with just the defaults, please) niche quite well. However, I still recommend Ubuntu for newcomers or for people who simply don't want the headache!
"OpenSSL bump from 1.0.2 to 1.1.x."
I apologize for having missed that.