The main reason I stay away from anything debian based these days is apt. I've been stuck in apt-hell a few too many times.
Antergos (arch-based) seems to be treating me well.
Antergos (arch-based) seems to be treating me well.
I may not be stretching its capabilities quite as far as you may be doing, admittedly.
The apt-related annoyance is that some PPAs don't carry updated packages (for all the recent Ubuntu versions), but has nothing to do with apt itself.
Maybe you refer to distro upgrades? To be fair I have little experience with those, as I never upgrade, only perform fresh installs.
Granted, I admit I mess around a bit with debian sources. I sometimes pin things, and often times pull packages from sid or unoffficial repos to get fresher versions.
With arch though, packages are always fresh, and the AUR has always worked well for me when I needed something not in the official repo. No issue so far.
Found your problem.
I tried looking into other distros (mint, fedora, ubuntu) but always found myself missing the awesome power of the Aur. So Antergos is the perfect compromise. It's easy to install (no manual configuration required) and gives me access to the Aur.