Hello, i'm considering trying out Arch and probably using it as my main work station. My biggest concern is the bandwidth. I only have 7gb worth of download a month; will this be suffice?

I'd also like to know how is the stability of Arch, and what type of packages come with the core image?

My monthly download is roughly 4.62 GiB, upload roughly 1.57 GiB (according to vnstat).

However, this is with torrents being transferred in the background, not just due to package updates.

I've found arch to be completely stable, and a very well-run distro. The vast majority of things I've wanted to install have been in the main repos, I don't remember installing very many things from the AUR.

Arch is a rolling release distro, that means that the testing time for new packages is very short. So Arch occasionally can (and will) break, most of the time not the whole system, but single applications. If you can't handle that and repair the system or are dependent that all of your applications work at any given time then you should think about your distro choice.

I've always found Arch to be stable, but---since it is "rolling release"--- there can be issues.

The core install is just under 400 MB---beyond that, it depends what you add to it. It looks like my Ubuntu setup is ~ 4GB.

the core install is basically nothing---CLI only---all the useful stuff gets added via the internet with the package manager.

From May the first i received 1GB (in package format) this month on updates this includes KDE, Libreoffice and kernel updates. KDE is probably the largest desktop system to upgrade, fortunately KDE doesn't update every month. Desktops like XFCE,Blackbox benefit in smaller updates but Gnome can be big one too. Consider your choice if you have 7gb worth of download a month.

thanks for the replies guys. I like vanilla which is why I'm considering arch. I just tested chakra, appealed to the part rolling release system. I hated it, bundles were awful. ill be downloading an arch ISO soon. I considder pacman to be the best package manager around, (zypper is a close second, but I hate the modulization of rpms).

thanks Tobi, I've read about how the rolling release cycle can cause breakage which is the whole reason I've put off trying a rolling release distro for so long; but I want new packages and my recent attempts to compile new software from source has been a been terrible. I've taken the easy road and will resume compiling from source another day.

I have dealt with small breakage of packages in the past and I can only find out if I can handle it by trying it righ.

I so use kde, one time updates I don't think will be much of an issue, but if I have to do it all the time its going to b to much. oh well you guys have given me some confidence so I'm going to give her a go. thanks