Favorite man page quote: "The backreference \n, where n is a single digit, matches the substring previously matched by the nth parenthesized subexpression of the regular expression." [excerpt from grep(1)]
just try, and you will love it
It's worth installing on a separate partition to mess with. That's about it.
My answers:
1) Xubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora 9
2) Too much time spent configuring, didn't get much back. Wasn't as fast as people say. In fact, once I had all the daemons I needed in the array, it was much slower than Ubuntu.
3) No, it breaks a lot. -Syu breaks things leaving you to fix it.
4) No
I don't understand what people were doing to their systems to get pacman to bork their stuff, but for me the only issue I had on Arch that I could never figure out was a Pulseaudio thing. My laptop has an LFE speaker on the bottom that is a crappy sub/speaker hybrid thing, and I have to make a custom analog-output.conf for my Pulseaudio to get that to work with volume change just like everything else otherwise it is either on full blast, or muted which makes the sound on the rest of the speakers tinny and sad. This only friggin' works on Ubuntu though as I have tried every thing I can think of on Arch to get Pulseaudio to behave *any* different than how it does upon installation. I couldn't get OSS to handle my LFE at all, so I said to hell with it and just keep using Ubuntu, because with checkinstall you get some of the perks that pacman gives you just without ABS, and AUR. AUR really kicks *** though.
It's not that -Syu breaks, more often the problem is that one of the programs you've updated has a bug or something that ends up breaking stuff. I've been fine for over a year now, but there have been a couple times in the past where dbus or hal were totally screwy after being updated, and the only solution was to revert to the previous version. But when you use a rolling release distro, that stuff is just going to happen.
Yes, It's a great learning experience. Just read the wiki.Is Arch REALLY worth installing?
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