I've also come across a distro called Frugalware. It uses pacman, and seems to be great distro from what I can tell. Do any Arch users here have any experience with Frugalware?

I agree. This is one important feature of Arch that I forgot to mention in my previous post.

Even though I'm a Linux newbie myself, I love Arch distribution. Mainly because I want to be constantly on the bleeding edge, but
prefer not to have to recompile everything like Gentoo does.
I tried many distributions before sticking with Arch. I like stability of Arch and the ability to actually learn the Linux.
I'd say if you like to be up-to-date, and not afraid to use command line then Arch is your distribution.

Sorry for reviving a old thread. I find myself in PRECISELY the same situation that scrappydoo was in when he started this thread. The views and situation he expressed in his initial post coincide with mine EXACTLY. scrappydoo, which distribution did you eventually go with? Also, another distribution that seems strangely absent from these discussions is gentoo. Why did you consider it not compatible with your aims of a minimal and configurable distro, and thereby consider only slack and arch?

I haven't tried pure Slack, but I went with VectorLinux because it was already pre-pacakged and without much cruft. Loved it, but I desperately felt the rough edges, there were packages I couldn't find for Slack, and after a while there were files on the system that the package management system seems to have left behind. I switched to Ubuntu, because every software these days comes in a deb and the repos are comprehensive. Loved the integration, the polish, but I got tired of it being so slow. Gave a try to Arch.

Everything is very fast now, but I miss the polish. It takes a LOT of time to customize it to what I got used to in Ubuntu, so I gave up on that. Now I'm being patient with the rough edges, and just use it as-is.

Love being on the bleeding edge. I got the latest and the greatest with no effort. Pacman really is superior to rpm, deb, or pkg.

BTW, Arch really revived my old laptop (512 RAM, 1.6 P4). Runs circles around windows.

Now I am looking for a cross between the polish of ubuntu and the speed of Arch... Maybe it's back to VectorLinux again?

Gentoo, from what I understand had lost its popularity lately, and then compiling every package is not my piece of cake...

Look at his latest post---he now uses Ubuntu and its progeny.

There are actually several threads that deal with the various "lean and mean" distros.

My 2 cents: I see the attraction of Slackware and have done many test installs. I still, however, prefer Arch (if only by a small margin). The major discriminator is pacman--one of the more efficient package management systems I have ever seen.

Actually, I'm about to re-configure my current machine---maybe I'll install both.

Exactly. What's to stop anyone from using both? I plan to give Arch a try in the not-too-distant future.

I used Slackware for 2 or 3 years until I messed things up pretty badly. Then I decided to change flavor and decided that I wanted another small distro like Arch, which is now my main distro for the past 2 years. I must say that Slackware's learning curve helped me more learn about linux than Arch. I find Arch linux much easier now when compared to the difficulties I faced with Slack. What I like best about Arch is, of course, pacman the package manager.

My advice would be that if you *really* want to learn about linux try Slackware for a year or two. Once you've master this distro, all the others will look easy. You'll develop this nice reflex of opening a terminal whenever there is a problem to be fixed even if an interface exist for it. (Which is good, IMO)

My 2cents