Two days ago I decided to take the plunge and switch from Linux Mint 5.0 (Elyssa) to something more current. In my search I found out about Arch. Arch is based on its own package manager (Pacman) and offers up new unmodified applications as they were meant to be used. After downloading the rather small ISO (150 MB!) and burning it to a CD-R I was ready to roll. Rather that using a simple installer it drops you down into a text based installer with multiple options. Partitioning, Setting default repositories, Selecting base packages and other customizations are done from the installer. Once the task of running through the installer is done you have a very minimal base system. When the computer is rebooted all you have is a shell, pacman (the package manager) and root access. From there you install anything you need. The first thing I did was read the man page for pacman. After I learned the syntax I ran a 'pacman -S gnome gdm xorg' That installed basic Gnome, the Gnome login manager and graphical environment. Next I fired up Epiphany (Gnome web browser) and headed off to get some drivers for my freedom hating Nvidia card. I spent the next few hours wading around Arch customizing it at my will. All of the packages are extremely current and almost any app can be found in the default arch repository the AUR (Arch User Repository). After using it for two days I have it all configured perfectly and even have Urban Terror (Favorite Linux Game!!). It is faster than any other Linux distribution I have ever used and I will be staying on it for a while.

To learn more about Arch Linux visit: http://www.archlinux.org/