The thing I hate about Arch: the AUR. It's horrible. There is no official tool to handle it, the package stability or coverage is spotty at best, and the unofficial tools (yaourt, etc.) suck.

But you have to use AUR, because that's where the breadth of the packages are. Arch's team is relatively small (compared to Debian's anyway) and they can't maintain that many packages. I agree with their choice of letting the community handle the rest — from their perspective it makes sense.

From my perspective, I'm never returning to the nightmare of AUR again. a) if I want to wait for stuff to compile for ages and then fail, I can just use Gentoo. b) Gentoo is at least more or less stable and has good coverage/stability. c) Portage is at least a good package manager (the second-best in Linux-land, imho, with dpkg/apt-get leading the pack.) Not to say pacman is bad, but yaourt just isn't good.

Can you give some examples of must-have software that are only in AUR? Having use Arch for years on multiple machines, I've rarely had to use AUR. And when I do, I've found it to be a marvelously simple mechanism - a bit like homebrew on a Mac, where you can easily edit the recipe if needed. It sure as hell beats installing unsupported software on Ubuntu.

I'll second that. Although you can get a similar simplicity in many other distros, however, what really makes Arch great for me is the community; they have one of the best wikis I have ever seen.