Have you tried Arch yet?

I would like to encourage anyone who hasn't tried Arch Linux to do so, for so many reasons. For newbs like me, it allows an entire OS to be built from the base iso, and teaches so much along the way. I still have so many questions, but I have learned more in the 2 days it took me to install Arch than I have in the previous 2 years of bouncing from distro to distro.
The base iso I downloaded is less than 300MB, and contains just that, a base linux system.
The Arch wiki is somewhat ambiguous, and requires a strong Linux knowledge, so sometimes when it instructs you to 'create a user account, and add it to group audio, optical and storage,' for example, it's off to google to find out how to do so.
Arch is extremely fast on my system (faster than all newbie distros, and faster than Debian and slack installations I had) and YOU build it, which is both educational and gratifying. By the end of the weekend I was able to stream video, watch DVD's, and play flash with Firefox in a full KDE environment using nvidia drivers with all the superkaramba and eye candy one could ask for. (And I am a newb)
The base iso and installation method I used allows for the initial kernel and base system to come right off the cd, then after configuring your eth0, the rest of the system can be built through pacman, the Arch package manager.
Pacman has been absolutely astrounding for me so far. It is simple, straightforward, and extrememly powerful. In my limited experience it is just as good as apt, and dependencies are all figured out for you.
Arch has one main configuration file, /etc/rc.conf, and this streamlines system tweaking for me. I easily added fam, portmaps, dbus and hal by a few keystrokes. Tonight I will be adding acpid, now that I figured out how.
The only thing I am still having trouble with, believe it or not, is the system clock, which I can't seem to figure out yet.

I did not compile from source, and I am not sure how to do so, but the system is so fast, I don't think I will even research how to do so. The Arch base iso installation is about as close to a Linux from scratch install that I feel comfortable with, both from a technical experience and patience standpoint.

So there it is, my recommendation. If you have the means, please check out Arch if you havn't done so already!

Yep I used it a while ago; I liked it quite a bit. Not too hard to use and configure, is kept up to date, and is pretty fast. Eventually, though, I ran into problems--some programs would just randomly close or the system would just freeze. It very well could have just been my computer, or the fact that I used some of my own packages. Keep in mind that this was probably a year or so ago.
ABS (the Arch Build System) is pretty cool as well. I didn't use it a whole lot, but I did recompile a few programs more to my liking with it.

i have used arch on and off for a couple of years and it is really a nice system, runs fast and most of the time everything just works like it should.

All of that having been said, i always seem to go back to gentoo, i don't think there has been a day in the last 3 years that i haven't had gentoo installed as a backup (old faithful).

anyway, arch is very nice, i just always go back to gentoo because it is what i know best.

A side note... Arch is about the closest to gentoo as a binary distro can be. If you do arch, gentoo will be easy, if you do gentoo, arch will be easy.

Glad to hear some positive reinforcement about it. I really like it a lot, and so far, even my fumbling fingers can't break it!
I currently have it installed on an old 5400RPM hdd, and I think I will be replacing my main distro (PCLinuxOS), which is on a nice fast SATA Barracuda, with Arch...I'm hoping she really flies then.


EDIT: I fixed my system clock.....just needed to set it through BIOS, and set LOCALTIME in rc.conf.

hmmm....where to fiddle next.