I've been a happy Arch user for 4 years, but I've been seriously considering moving to FreeBSD. Lots of similarities between the two, and FreeBSD has all the software I use in its ports tree. It seems to have the right balance of simplicity and customizability, and the -STABLE branch gets regular updates while being more stable, reliable and predictable than Arch. Stability has become a big concern of mine, insofar as I've finally got my user applications and system services and such configured just so and don't want to wonder if the next Arch update will break something. I've never had any major breaks on Arch, but I'm at the point where even minor setbacks piss me off. Case in point: While all of my outgoing email from the last week has ended up in the "Sent" folder none of them have actually been sent. I've been screwing with it for over an hour. If this mail reaches the list it's because Mutt's built-in SMTP support worked, which means msmtp is broken, possibly from the recent gnutls update. Second time a gnutls update broke something in the last month.
I've play with CRUX before and was impressed by its ports system, but since a) managing wireless is more tedious than I think it should be, and b) you're pretty much required to maintiain your own heap of ports, I'll probably take a pass on that. CRUX has always felt kinda kludge-y. I'd give OpenBSD a try if it weren't lacking a couple packages/ports I need for work. Gentoo isn't an option. Don't get me started. -- "A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." - Douglas Adams
