Realitically, I use Synaptic most of the time anyway. I’ve not heard of wajig so I’ll look into it, thanks for the tip! I’ve heard it’s bad practice to mix package managers, as they can mess up your dependencies and other records? I do know if you pin something to a specific version in Synaptic, apt-get still wants to update it, even though there appears to be an apt standard for pinning packages.

Maybe I will go back to Ubuntu too, who knows? You are right about apt (apt-get or aptitude), but pacman also has many options, and not so easy to remember. In both cases, the man command is your friend :^) Besides, have you considered wajig? You should give it a try if you want an “all-in-one” substitute for aptitude, apt-cache and dpkg.

I absolutely love the BSD-style init, it’s so much simpler than the SysV-style mess of runlevel folders and scripts. The existence of yaourt is the best thing ever, a package manager that compiles from source, brilliant! I also really liked pacman, it was so simple and yet powerful. You can do almost all the same things with apt but the functions are spread over several binaries and convoluted unintuitive commands which I can never remember. In fact, the amount of control all the distro-specific tools give you over the PC is superb. The community is great too, very helpful and full of patient, creative and talented people who are happy to share their latest script/find/trick/theme with you.

Eventually, though, I got sick of two things. First that Arch is not overall as “polished” as some other distros. Lots of nice little settings I’d gotten used to in Ubuntu like Gnome’s default Places just aren’t there in Arch. And secondly, I realised I was spending a sizeable amount of time just maintaining the distro. Fixing broken things after updates, tweaking yet another module or config file or service when I wanted to do something which just works out of the box on Ubuntu. I use Linux because it lets me do my own “stuff” faster, not because I want to spend my life in a command prompt asking questions on forums.

My time with Arch was great and it was a good learning experience into more inner Linux workings, as well as seeing which things can be better/worse when trying different distros, but I’ll stick with Ubuntu for now.