February 27, 2012 10:28 PM PST
I like Debian and Gentoo. Gentoo isn't that hard to install and configure on a clean install. It appears that most emerge/ebuild failures are from old installs.
But, for KDE, must add "extras" to the "USE=" variable or the Gentoo packaging system will give bull about a required portion being missing and terminate. It frusterates me that it gives me a fatal error over just not having "extras".
Arch went fine for me when installed on my Acer Aspire M5630, which has Intel graphics, despite there's a "GRAPHICS BY ATi" sticker lol.
But, pacman is messed up, the mirrors are messed up, some files appear to be missing from mirrors for no good reason, pacman frequently displays "Not found" for files pacman needs to fetch and terminates, for *many* files and I had to keep switching mirrors in the mirrorlist file, just to complete the installation of KDE!
The errors from pacman are more likely a 404. I never had errors like that with apt and emerge.
From my current experience, Arch has the most breakage.
Pacman was worse on a system with Nvidia graphics:
When I did pacman -S nvidia, pacman acted like malware, I saw error message "command not found" go by on the screen then on reboot, I got error message "ERROR: root fs cannot be detected".
Pacman felt alpha-like when trying Arch.
Looks like it messed up the initramfs portion. I cannot recommend Arch for PCs with Nvidia graphics at this time.
This post was edited by Randy Anderson at February 27, 2012 10:28 PM PST