Within a few months of beginning with Linux, it became obvious that I was one of those who have severe difficulties settling on a distribution. This situation presents some unique challenges, but generally, I've found there are more benefits than drawbacks. While I may have favorites, or be more familiar with some distributions than others, they all offer a little something different.

This weekend, I finally got a chance to take Arch for a spin. A basic installation isn't a huge time investment, and while it isn't quite as "under the hood" as Gentoo is, it's a clear canvas for those needing specific tasks and control on their system.

By nature, Arch Linux is barebones. It is optimized for i686 and x86-64 architecture chips, and official and community repositories offer the full range of applications you'd expect from any of the "larger" distributions. Of course, the idea behind Arch is that you choose the included applications, development and desktop environments, daemons and services.

Arch does a very respectable job making this simple.

rest here