[sp4rki]

Haven't had such problems with Arch in the last couple of months really. I value more the customizability and control that Arch offers than pretty much anything else. It hits the proverbial spot in my quasi-requirement mixture from both Gentoo and Slackware usage. Ubuntu might be easier to get going and maintain, but it's goal of becoming a distro for the common men and women of the world does not align well with me to be honest. Both Ubuntu and Debian are too opinionated for my taste.

To be fair, at work I've used Debian a lot for servers, and it had worked pretty good all the time with very few exceptions. In comparison Ubuntu (which I know is Debian based) always breaks for me. It's amazing how I can always get stuff done in minutes in Debian but I always have a problem with Ubuntu. This is to the point that I would rather work with the botched in-house distro of Solaris I used on a mini mainframe I used to work with and maintain some 8 years ago than Ubuntu. Even with the weird customized vi/vim it had, that made life for me and the sys admin incredibly painful.

All that being said... Slackware was the distro that made me fall in love with Linux a decade and a half ago, and one of the reasons I'm jumping out of the Apple bandwagon is their recent tendency to make their machines more common-user friendly, but less of an "hackers" machine. Therefore, I'm tremendously biased regarding Os' and Distros.