I know I am perhaps a bit late to this thread and perhaps don't belong here but I'd like to weigh in. Here's some history if anyone cares: I've been an Arch user since 0.6 and spent 6-8 months in 2004/2005 being probably the most active person in #archlinux when I helped more new users than I can count. I've since been preoccupied by my studies but I continue to use Arch whenever I can and keep it as my go-to distro for things ranging from small installs to desktop systems I intend to heavily use. I like Ubuntu, I like Fedora, I like Slackware, I used to like Gentoo and I keep up with their releases and try all of them, but Arch is my hands down favorite. I moved to Arch because it was such a clean distrobution which you could always figure out and keep track of, and thats why I've kept up with it. If anything, I'm the user you might not be hearing from. I think the best example I've seen of the "Arch Way" is the refusal of making pacman run lilo after it had installed a new kernel. Arch expects the user to understand their system, understand what they need, and be very clear and simple in what it does. I'd like pacman to give me output when it updates a package whose path, config syntax or whatever changed so I can be responsible for fixing it. I don't want the installer to be making groups for me, I don't want the package manager to be changing any more than it really needs to. As for bug fixes, in my opinion, I feel its up to the pacackage mainters, sometimes things just come up that need fixing and can't be bothered with waiting for upstream. However, Arch should stay out of the way enough that I can submit a bug report to a project and KNOW exactly what I may have that might effect the apps behavior because I installed or changed something to run significantly different from upstream. I agree with most of the old timers here, if you guys want a distro that holds your hand through everything and tells you everything, then perhaps Arch isn't for you, the Frugalware guys are nice though! Arch has always expected their users to be *smart* and have a solid understanding of their system and their setup and leave running the system up to the user. Thats what gentoo used to be in 2003/2004; when it became swamped with new users who turned it into the automated and out-of-control distro it is today, I (and many others) promptly dropped it and went back to Slack. Please, don't send Arch into the hole of being a distro so automated it escapes the control of the user from the start and never relenquishes it. Thank you, sepht P.S. Sorry for the formatting, I dunno what Opera+gmail are up to...