<div><br></div><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><br> Anybody using Arch Linux? I've heard good things, but I am a bit wedded to<br>
Debian's packaging system. What's pacman like? and does their package<br> management really work.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Yes, I use Arch Linux on all (5) my systems (servers, netbook, desktop) and six other laptops and desktops that family and friends run. I too was only ever impressed by the Debian package management until I came across Pacman, the Arch package manager, which I believe is equal to, if not superior to, dpkg/apt/synaptic.</div>
<div><br></div><div>You do need to be careful if you play Pacman Roulette, the game where you simply run '(sudo) pacman -Syu' every 5 minutes or so, as you are literally running on the bleeding edge and occasionally, probably happened to me twice in three years, you can get cut up! It is always possible to stitch up the wounds and recover the system (although you have current back-ups, don't you?) but I usually take the opportunity to start a fresh install with my new 'favourite' features from scratch.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Arch Linux is <b>the</b> 'distro hopping stopper' as I will testify after several years of looking at the green grass on the other side of the fence I don't even bother installing any other distro because anything that is available on Fedora/Ubuntu/OpenSuse can be installled/applied to Arch.</div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><div>All the best,</div><div><br></div><div>Simon.</div></div>