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Comment by kunai | Hacker News Reader

And you know what comes next after Arch...

...Gentoo.

This never happened to me. It is easy enough to write a custom build environment pkgbuild and put it on the aur, and use an aur helper like pacaur to cache the git repos. I tried gentoo on a vm after getting frustrated and wanting to do a configure / make / install on Samba, but after a few hours compiling coreutils I gave up and concluded that it is just a silly waste of electricity for everyone in the world to recompile the same binaries, or slightly different ones with one feature change that might break interactions with a dozen other applications. Someone else can just build optimized binaries for my architecture and were good, the last 5% isn't worth the power bill, it is cheaper to just buy 5% faster parts.

But I can't go to anything but Arch. I have opensuse on my grandparents PC and I so desperately want to put Arch on it since managing the legacy in any of the distros that aren't Arch (ie, /boot/grub and /boot/grub2 on a standard install, init scripts mixed with systemd units, xinetd + systemd, etc) makes me feel like its 2003 instead of 2013. I sometimes put dual boot Ubuntu / Windows on some of my freelance IT customers to let them pick what they like and keep the other as a failsafe, but tweaking Ubuntu now feels like a chore. I still giggle with glee when installing a new Arch box though.

LFS with the aide of NetBSD's pkgsrc. ;)

I've been tempted to go down that route before...

Looks doable without too much work based on scanning http://wiki.netbsd.org/pkgsrc/how_to_use_pkgsrc_on_linux/

Oh yes, pkgsrc on linux in general is actually rather nice. I used to frequently use it on university machines in my home directory so that I didn't have to go through the system admins every time I wanted some little tool installed.

Actually I went from Gentoo to Arch. I tried, tirelessly, to run a stable Gentoo desktop (server is much easier). However its not worth the wait in terms of compile times or just emerge pains to begin with. The Arch model is great if you want the cutting edge with stability. Gentoo seems more bleeding edge and less reliable. Defiance is my goto on the reliable side of cloud and virtual instances. Arch and Debian are very complimentary in my case.

I chose FreeBSD... I wish that I would have tried FreeBSD years sooner, but I guess it's better late than never.

I run FreeBSD on my desktops, but I've found there is absolutely no option to run them on any notebooks. Linux is king for laptops.

What's wrong with running FreeBSD on laptops? Works for me...

Working suspend and resume was always the deal breaker for me and caused me to switch over to OpenBSD on my laptop.

Unfortunately, OpenBSD 5.3 didn't have any support for my Atheros WiFi card, so I'm sticking with FreeBSD.

I'll agree that many Linux distros are better for beginners, but I dislike having software which I won't use included in my operating system, and I appreciate the FreeBSD ports system and it's ease of use.

Suspend/resume would be nice, but is not a deal breaker for me, as shutting down and powering on doesn't take so long that it's unreasonable, and with a 12 cell battery my netbook runs all day on a full charge.

FreeBSD does have excellent atheros support thanks to adrian chadd. He's doing wonders for their wireless stack.

As for suspend and resume, it didn't become an issue until recently when my workflow became sit for half-an-hour to an hour, then pick up and move multiple times a day. Rebooting, opening all my programs again, etc. became tedious.

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