The rolling release model - you always have the latest stuff. Latest git, firefox, pidgin, all the latest released version of dev libraries and tools. The AUR i

The rolling release model - you always have the latest stuff. Latest git, firefox, pidgin, all the latest released version of dev libraries and tools. The AUR is handy for installing proprietary stuff like google-chrome, hipchat, no-machine, or packaging up things you install outside Arch but need e.g. old free software that isn't in Arch. Generally Arch doesn't patch upstream software unless it is absolutely necessary and they are keen to drop patches when an issue is fixed, so if you read on a project's website that the config file is in /etc/whatever.conf then it will be. In other distros they move stuff around in a more capricious way. The dist-upgrade thing is also kinda true. It's not that it breaks everything - I use Ubuntu too, and I don't think I've ever had an upgrade break on me in 10+ years - but you need to set aside a few hours to upgrade the world each time. With a rolling release you can spread those few hours out over the 6 months. Just a few minutes a day or per week. Also, because you go from one release to the next, as the upstream developer envisioned, the compatibility of programs between versions tends to work out OK. Whereas in a longer-term release there can be big version jumps that the upstream dev did not really anticipate, causing things to break. For example, maybe some feature gets deprecated and there are some months were releases show a warning "hey, this feature is going away, do this other thing instead". You can sort it out early in Arch. But in another distro, you go from the release with a feature to a release without it, and no smooth transition between versions. And all at once, so "everything" breaks/changes that same day.