I think I'm giving up on arch and going with slackware. Too many network issues on the machine I'm working with (an old emachine that looks like it beat up an imac and stole its lunch money). Slackware with swaret looks pretty cool so I'm going to give that a try. Swaret just seems to be a little more sensible in layout and operation than pacman.

Ok, heres my two cents from my Noob point of view. I am now running Gentoo myself, and have been distro hopping for about 4 months now and after all that, I miss apt-get. Apt-get was easy, took care of dependancies for me, made suggestions if my spelling was wrong, etc. After that, I guess portage isn't too bad. I like pacman, but portage seems to keep to stable releases and hardly breaks anything unless I'm not paying attention. That said, its a matter of personal preference. Like people are already saying, make a small "test" partition and give it a go. Its the great thing about linux that made me switch anyway: Theres always a choice.

Welcome dnlddz. Glad to have you aboard
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no-one seems to have answered this, so thought I'd chip in.

Although not a direct equivalent, when you use pacman to install/update something it will report any other upgrades/dependencies that are required and give you another bite the cherry to say y or n before proceeding, so much the same functionality.

They're not quite the same. I'd vote for this being yaourt vs emerge instead. *shrug*

That said, I use both. Portage and emerge are great if you and your computer have the time and gerbilpower to do a compile, so on my big powerful desktop, I use Gentoo/Portage. On my other machine, which is not so powerful, I need binary packages. Arch/Pacman is great for that... especially since there's always yaourt if I need it.

Same thing goes for Sabayon. Binary packages from entropy, source packages from portage if those don't work well enough for me... but Sabayon is off the topic, so I'll just say I use both (Arch and Gentoo) for different computers and leave it at that.

Its really not so bad on my laptop. Large ones like say, KDM desktop or Libreoffice I just leave to compile overnight and its done when I wake up. Its not too old, but not new either. I guess it matters if you compile very often or cant leave things overnight.

On another note, Ill still vote for apt-get, but Im starting to like portage a lot more and my response might change soon.