> These days, it feels like the torch is being passed to the Arch based distros. It does. What would you say are the features driving that? My guesses are: 1.

> These days, it feels like the torch is being passed to the Arch based distros. It does. What would you say are the features driving that? My guesses are: 1. Users find repository management painful or cumbersome, especially but not exclusively on deb-based distros. On Arch you've basically got a couple of distro repos plus a giant catch-all (the AUR) so there's no real repo management in practice. 2. Speed is a package manager's most visible, user-facing feature, and pacman is very fast, relatively speaking. 3. People have bad experiences of botched release upgrades, and most Arch-based distros just don't have those 4. The AUR has a very low barrier to entry, which substantially soothes the typical 'straying from the happy path' pain point, because it means there are easily available packages for novel, proprietary, and quirky or ill-behaved applications which can be difficult, impossible, or slow to get packaged and maintained so they can reside in a distro's main repos.