[amyjess]

This too is why I switched to Arch for my new desktop I built last month.

Forget to update for a while? Good luck getting your system into a sane state ever again. Better yet, if you go a while without updating, you'll wind up with package conflicts in your dependency graph (the worst is the dreaded "package X and package Y both insist on different versions of the same dependency"), and it'll take you forever to manually untangle them.

I've been using Gentoo as my main since 2004 or 2005, though I had some Arch experience from my work desktop at my last job (I installed Arch on it because I wanted something Gentoo-like but wasn't about to risk Compile Hell when I had deadlines to pay attention to). The decision to switch wasn't an easy one, but it's been very rewarding. I'm still of the opinion that portage is the best package management system I've used (it's not just for compiling stuff from source: there's no reason someone can't build a binary distro using portage), but pacman is a pretty damn close second, and I'll take pacman's lack of flexibility over Compile Hell any day.

I still have conflicting thoughts about systemd. I actually ripped it out on my old work computer and replaced it with OpenRC (to fulfil my goal of "something Gentoo-like but without all the compiling"), but on this machine I decided I'd keep systemd around for at least a few weeks because I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and learn something new. Now, I'm not sure what to do. I've discovered there's a bunch of stuff to really like about systemd (in particular, "systemctl status" is amazing), but on the other hand, I really miss OpenRC, and I happen to prefer its idioms over systemd's (I'm sorry, but you will never convince me that INI-style syntax isn't the ugliest thing ever).