I have a friend who uses Arch, she likes it a lot. I've been a Gentoo user for a number of years. From my outside perspective, Arch is similar to Gentoo in term

I have a friend who uses Arch, she likes it a lot. I've been a Gentoo user for a number of years. From my outside perspective, Arch is similar to Gentoo in terms of configurability and power but without the beefy install process and it has a mirror of pre-built binaries for packages (you can compile from source if you want) where Gentoo typically only keeps binaries around for big things like OpenOffice, browsers, and proprietary drivers. Arch definitely seems more Linuxy though in the heritage of Debian, whereas Gentoo seems to take a bunch of ideas from the BSD folk. One thing I love about Portage over pacman is the masking. Arch seems to take bleeding-edge a little less seriously.