Arch isn't at all bare bones, that's more of an outdated humblebrag than anything else. Actually, neither is Slackware. I find sbopkg and SlackBuilds.org to be

Arch isn't at all bare bones, that's more of an outdated humblebrag than anything else. Actually, neither is Slackware. I find sbopkg and SlackBuilds.org to be better than yaourt and AUR. sbopkg's UI is just top notch (ncurses-based). Slackware uses sysvinit with flat rc scripts as opposed to the traditional System V setup of numbered symlink farms. Much cleaner. Arch uses systemd. Slackware's pkgtools are much more minimalistic than pacman. They're shell functions that manage local tarballs. In addition, you have slackpkg for fetching remote updates. Slackware actually double-functions as both a rolling and stable release distribution. You can either set slackpkg to track -current, which is often bleeding edge yet surprisingly robust, or stick to official versions like 14.1. Slackware's installer and setup utilities are all ncurses-driven rather than pure CLI as in Arch. I actually find them much more capable. The only pure CLI part of installing Slackware is disk partitioning, the rest is a highly detailed TUI menu installer (similar to FreeBSD if you've tried that). Slackware has a very strict devotion to not patching upstream packages at all, with exceptions only in the most critical circumstances. This means that you're pretty much always using vanilla Linux userland as it is, and so if there's bugs, you report to upstream rather than to the distribution tracker. If you're a developer, this is great. Slackware's package management can alternate between binary and source-based. As such, I'd recommend Slack. It's venerable and rock solid.