Reply #29: I MAY have to make a retraction...

[darkstar3]

Since you are the fourth person to suggest Arch to me, I thought I should give it a fair shake. Let me tell you, I'm impressed. The differences between Gentoo and Arch seem small, and migration has been nearly painless for me. Where Gentoo takes a minimum of 17 hours to setup on this laptop, I setup a dual-boot to Arch in 5 hours, and that included the time necessary to properly install on a current LVM setup, which is pretty complex if you don't want to lose data.

So far, so good. It's clean, it's fast, and I even managed to get direct rendering, compiz, and my touchpad working with no effort. Those items have been problematic in past distro testing. Don't get me wrong, there have been a few hiccups (like suspend/resume, KVM/QEMU/SDL, wireless performance, and getting my themes back that weren't in a pacman repo), but I've managed to solve all but one of them without banging my head against a wall.

I'm reserving judgment on the possibility of permanent migration at the moment, but I am going to continue using this Arch installation exclusively for a while in order to give it a proper test run. And here I thought I would use Gentoo until it disappeared...