I was very disappointed with the debian version of linux mint. It was just awful. I have used archlinux for 2 years and I wanted a rolling release easy to use, but mint debian was slow, had connection problems and overall crashed way too many times.
I moved to crunchbang and it works very well. All out of the box. Fast, very fast. Very nice design overall. I don't understand why its releases never reach the front page of HN.
Could not agree more, although I dislike Arch. The reason I do is since it's extremely unsafe, I would want something as bleeding edge as Arch but with a purely functional package manager like Nix or GNU Guix. (I know you can install Nix on Arch but then I will still have to use Nixpkg repo.)
Many AUR packages just pull from the HEAD of some git repo or pull down X random tarball from a URL.
With something like Debian, you have layers of package maintainers in the middle to insulate against attacks, and specific, immutable bundles of data included in the packages themselves. Also, the entire Debian infrastructure (signing keys and all) being compromised, and such an incident going unnoticed, is a much less likely occurrence than the same for the hosting site some individual software author uses.
Sure, you can still add third-party repositories to Debian and install deb packages from outside the main sources. But when you do that, you're making a conscious decision to do so, on a package-by-package basis. Any package you pull from AUR could be vulnerable, unless you manually check the source of each and every one. When you install from the Debian repos, you can trust that a certain standard of quality and security is being upheld.
Why not? Because of the problems due to running updated software or are you aware of some problem with packages?
I ask because I have run Arch in production for the past 3 years on about 10 servers without any problems (knock on wood). Only official packages and always after quickly testing the latest pacman -Syu on a test machine.
Compare to a couple Ubuntu servers I have to deal with I have to go out of the way to get more recent packages, which are often unofficial (I avoid having to build packages where possible).
If I run bleeding-edge packages I want atomic updates (if install fail it won't change the state of the rest of the system) and support for roll-back (if a package is unstable I can easily go back one version without ruining the dependency tree for all other packages).
Arch is very lean and it's absurdly up to date. Debian is a monstruosity and even it's testing branch is not as up to date as arch.
However, arch breaks things often, very often. You make updates crossing fingers you will be able to reboot. Debian, crunchbang, overall, is very stable.
It depends what you want. If you are not a linux guru and need to work on your system, then go for something easy and stable like debian, otherwise do go for arch.
---
Edit
Yes, I talked all the time about Debian and I missed #!. Let me say, crunchbang for me it's just an easy way to get a debian testing. I prefer it like this as last time I used Debian it had some rough edges I have no time anymore to smooth over. I want things to work out of the box and a good community, check #!, they actually have a nice welcoming community.
I would say although Arch has a steep learning curve, there's plenty of documentation and tutorials about getting started. I have a machine that runs it and love it and I'm in no way a Linux guru.
I've only had one update issue, otherwise, it's pretty been reliable.
Note that Manjaro (http://www.manjaro.org/) is a "user-friendly" distro based on Arch. I tried it briefly via a liveCD from a British Linux magazine, and it looked promising.
That's kinda what I expected, an out of the box OpenBox setup built on top of Debian. It does say they use packages from their repository so there must be some differences than if you did it yourself.
yes, but archbang and crunchbang have nice defaults.
As great as Arch's documentation is (best in all linuces I've tried), I still prefer to have some nice defaults so I can get stuff done whilst learning the knobs.
I moved to crunchbang and it works very well. All out of the box. Fast, very fast. Very nice design overall. I don't understand why its releases never reach the front page of HN.