New Member

[trev.saunders at gmail.com]

Hi,

SO my current view on distros is the following.  I have two general use cases.  
Case 1:
This is mostly servers, but also personal machines for other people and such where I want to do as little maintanance as posible.  I also want a stable basic system that general is fairly small.  FOr these system I use debian either stable or testing depending on exact needs.

case 2:
System which will be heavily customized to fit my exact needs.  For these systems I care about how things are configured, and am willing to put energy into configuring them.  For these machines I run gentoo, accept my laptop which will become a gentoo box soon.

>From what I saw on the arch wiki it looks like arch is somewhere between these  two.  It looks like debian meets my need for a system I can setup and basically let run with the occasional update better with far less effort.  It looks like arch's use of binary packages will make it not customizeable enough for the machines I care about.

An example of a system I want to setup and just let run is the mail openvz container on my server I want to set it up and just let it run.   Debian stable does a good job here it's fairly secure and I trust it  to run without my intervention, and only gets updated every couple months.  On that system I can deal with dependancies pulling x libs etc.  

On the other hand the hypervizer of that server runs gentoo, because there having x libs etc hauled in is far less aceptable because of security etc.  THis makes gentoo's use flags which alow me to control dependancies are very useful.

So I'm curious what people like about arch especially over gentoo?

Trev