Using Arch Linux has been a refreshing experience, so far. There are not as many prebuilt packages as are available for Gentoo or Debian, but most of the primary software I use is easily available. pacman, the Arch package management tool, is a wonder. Yes, it works a lot like apt, which is also an amazing piece of software. So is yum. I don’t know why I like pacman particularly, but it works astoundingly well, which is good enough for me, for now.
If you’re contemplating a move to Arch, you might find a bit of a learning curve, even if you’re a linux veteran; the tools (primarily pacman) are different, and although they do many or most of the same things that apt or emerge do, the syntax will be new. The documentation is decent, though not necessarily as complete as that of Gentoo, or even Debian (or Ubuntu).
So why use Arch? I’m not being a very good marketer here, but I’d say the best reason to use Arch would be because you want to. An install takes about 20 minutes; try it out for a day. It’s fun.
