I'm puzzled by this comment. Arch values elegance, code correctness, and minimalism. Initially Arch installs a very minimal base system, and package management is done via rolling release.
Perhaps you should explain exactly how Arch is a "maintenance nightmare."
Ok, I'm speaking purely from my experience and there's a big chance that I'm stupid but:
I've tried running Arch as my main OS in the last year. I needed a weekend to configure the OS and even wrote a little daemon to handle the conservative fan spin ups on my overheating Macbook Pro. After that it was great as long as it lasted.
But then the OS just died 3 times. What had I done? A simple
> pacman -Syu
was enough. Whenever there was a bigger change (a new kernel, new init system, etc.) a simple update would render my Arch installation unbootable. And to get everything to work I had to waste hours (in one case days because of re-install) to get it to work again.
That's not something I want from an OS I'm using productively.
If all the initscripts and kernel updates break Arch, then you probably made a mistake or two in some conf file installing it. (eg not having /boot correctly in the fstab will break you on every kerenl update, for example)
When I used Arch last year, they also regularly break things in ways that require manual fixes every month or so. So don't dare update without first reading the news, lest you end up with a broken system and no way to find out why it broke. Stick with Debian or Ubuntu if its your main laptop OS.
Haven't had such problems with Arch in the last couple of months really. I value more the customizability and control that Arch offers than pretty much anything else. It hits the proverbial spot in my quasi-requirement mixture from both Gentoo and Slackware usage. Ubuntu might be easier to get going and maintain, but it's goal of becoming a distro for the common men and women of the world does not align well with me to be honest. Both Ubuntu and Debian are too opinionated for my taste.
To be fair, at work I've used Debian a lot for servers, and it had worked pretty good all the time with very few exceptions. In comparison Ubuntu (which I know is Debian based) always breaks for me. It's amazing how I can always get stuff done in minutes in Debian but I always have a problem with Ubuntu. This is to the point that I would rather work with the botched in-house distro of Solaris I used on a mini mainframe I used to work with and maintain some 8 years ago than Ubuntu. Even with the weird customized vi/vim it had, that made life for me and the sys admin incredibly painful.
All that being said... Slackware was the distro that made me fall in love with Linux a decade and a half ago, and one of the reasons I'm jumping out of the Apple bandwagon is their recent tendency to make their machines more common-user friendly, but less of an "hackers" machine. Therefore, I'm tremendously biased regarding Os' and Distros.
Last year admittedly was rather bad in that sense, because of a couple sweeping changes. Hopefully we don't have to repeat those too many times in the future.
The flipside is that Arch Linux has shown to be able to make sweeping and controversial changes rapidly for longer term benefit.
Considering that they have LTS versions if you have slightly older hardware (12.04 is supported for 5 years), you aren't forced to upgrade.
I've been using Ubuntu since Breezy and every upgrade I haven't had a problem. I use it on many of my machines (apart from my laptop due to Bumblebee) and have had no issues with the 6 month updates, but I usually stay on the LTS versions.
The initial configuration is tiresome and complicated. While knowing the details is important, using them as a barrier to entry i.e. by removing the arch installer is just a hideous waste of time.
Occasionally, I've had a broken system, packages or dependency failure which has left me in the royal shit with a recovery disk and a text editor.
pacman has no transactional semantics around it so you can't stage a package or roll it back easily and no-destructively as you can in deb and RPM based distributions.
It relies on the default configuration of all pieces of software i.e. minimal changes to upstream. This is good and all, but most of the upstreams have retarded and dangerous by default configurations. You have to vet every damn package upgrade.
As for rolling upgrades, introducing major new package versions mid-cycle is a major risk, particularly when it comes to large critical packages such as DB engines and web servers. Minor version changes can literally shred you. MySQL are very good at that for example (I no longer use their product due to the awful bugs in early 5.0.x release).
I see people above are moaning about Ubuntu in comparison. In fact that is just as bad, but for a different reason: it's just hideously mismanaged.
They ignore the collective knowledge and mini frameworks that are included in other distributions (for example the /etc/apache2 structure in Debian derivatives). These are incredibly powerful at managing configuration through upgrades etc so hours with diff aren't required.
To be honest, I have a virtual machine floating around which was once a physical machine. It was deployed on a Compaq Professional Workstation 5000 (nice dual Pentium Pro 200 with 128Mb of RAM, 4 Matrox heads and 18Gb of SCSI disks) with Debian 2.0.
This installation is now at Debian 6.0. This has been accomplished EASILY with ONLY dist-upgrades since day one and has survived about 5 bits of hardware.
That's how it should be. Rolling releases are dangerous. Planned staged releases.
And no I don't particularly care that my Ruby VM is X years out of date.
It does need some more time to setup, that's true - things like custom drivers, power management, etc. require some config changes. But once it's working, I don't see it as a maintenance nightmare.
The only two points I could complain about is that:
1. There should be a better guide/support for dkms, or you have to recompile your driver by hand every kernel upgrade
2. You must look at the `pacman` output while upgrading the system, because sometimes (rarely) the migration step is printed out for manual application (for example "mkinitcpio hooks changed, replace all of pata, scsi, sata, usb with a single hook block").
I'd never recommend Arch to a beginner, but it's far from maintenance nightmare.
Alternately all the important bits of pacman output are in /var/log/pacman.log and everything that _requires_ manual intervention is posted on the archlinux.org site. You should not update before checking the arch news.
It is not as long as you pay attention and know what you want.
There is always a tradeoff between 'works as _I_ want' and 'how much time _I_ have to spend on maintenance'. It is always your choice, and if you want an OS that you can craft exactly to your needs Arch is currently the best (in most cases, of course).
I've spent a couple of hours a few times a year having to maintain my OS so far. I vastly prefer this to Ubuntu, where pretty much everything broke every 6 months.
The tradeoff is that you get new and shiny software continually.
