I use [Archlinux][Arch] everywhere on production servers at work and at home. [Arch]:http://archlinux.org At work we use Arch for the following reasons * It's simple. Using Arch is dead easy compared to Debian, Ubuntu, and Slackware (my old favorite). * It's vanilla. Arch doesn't mess with upstream code, it contributes to upstream. * It's current. Arch has the freshest packages. Partly because of it's vanilla policy. As a startup using the latest tech it's quite foolish to use a distro that bundles old (Admittedly proven) versions of our tools. * It's stable (enough). This one is the most disputed but if you pay attention when you `pacman -Syu` it's pretty tough to break a system. I'm running the testing repo on my home workstation and laptop because core is too boring.

__Some reasons not to use Arch__ * You have to pay attention. You can't just forget about it for long periods of time. * It is currently susceptible to (theoretical) man-in-the-middle attacks on mirror sites. To get around this you could use the Arch Build System (Like Gentoo or ports) and build everything you need from source then use that machine as a local mirror. So if total security is a must just use Gentoo. * It moves fast. Don't expect to be running Postgresql 8.4 on here it or anything that isn't the latest release. Major upgrades are announced so everyone sees them but there's no support cycle for old releases. Upgrading individual packages rather than the whole system for long periods of time is haphazard and not sustainable. * They're already using Py3k as `/usr/bin/python`. This is part of moving fast but I put it here because it's exceptionally important and upset a lot of Python folks.

Sometime in the coming months I am actually preparing a longer form version of this for my blog. I'll naturally post that to HN.