No end to god-awful arch, compiling GCC 4.7...

[Tuishimi]

Off-topic but the OP mentioned it so...

I just want to plug Ada... it's a wonderful, powerful language. :) My favorite in fact, even tho' I haven't used it in decades now.

[firey]

So I found that Wheezy comes with 3.2 kernel. I decided to download and install 3.9. Was rough at first, due to the Virtual Box drivers being built for 3.2. After re-installing them, and clearing out all 3.2 files and such, I believe I got everything working properly on 3.9. A lot more work than arch, but at the same time it didn't completely explode like I have had happen with Arch.

[n_K]

Another interesting thing with arch... Upgraded to 3.9 kernel on macbook and now guess what.... Kernel panic, some problem with the i915 graphics. Well done arch team, once again you didn't test **** and just put it in stable.

Was gonna VM debian but heck I'll replace the arch partition on here with it.

[Salutary7]

Hm, maybe Arch team is feeling pressure to speed up release cycles since they've become so popular? As an aside, after dealing with the ups and downs of various distros over the years, I've sadly relegated all my Linux use to VMs running on Windows. Personally I think CentOS is pretty nice since I can be fairly certain the feature creep won't add up to something catastrophic.

[ViperAFK]

Arch doesn't really have release cycles, and its always been a self-proclaimed cutting edge distros. Arch gets the latest upstream packages into testing very quickly after release, and they go into the stable repos not long after that if no major issues are reported. When using arch you will run into upstream bugs and regressions, but on the other hand you also get bug fixes faster too.

most of the time I don't really find arch particularly more "unstable" or "buggy" at any given time than other distros, the difference is that with more stable distros (such as debian stable) you know what the bugs are and you are unlikely going to get introduced to new bugs (and since the software has been tested for so long there generally isn't any massive bugs), but it can also be likely that the bugs you began with will go unfixed for a long time. With arch the bugs/stability is more in flux, the bugs you initially run into may be fixed very quickly, but later on down the line new bugs can be introduced because its constantly being updated with very recent upstream software.

From what I've seen of n_K's posts, I would say that arch is not really what he is looking for in a distro. You should ask yourself what you want in a distro, and evaluate what distro you use based on that.