I've "installed" Arch + KDE (vanilla) on 7 computers now, ranging from a P2 300MHz 192MB (circa 1998) to a P4 1.7GHz 512MB, and including two Via C3 1.2GHz 256MB laptops. Actually, I lie and only installed Arch from scratch on one disktop and cloned the Arch partition files to the other machines using:
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# rsync -av /mnt/sdx/ root@machine2:/mnt/sdy/
after booting both machines from Arch installation CDs and enabling networking. Then with a little bit of tweaking fstab, rc.conf etc, and of course, GRUBbing around with menu.lst, I had the other machines booting nicely. These systems are used for quite a wide variety of applications, including the usual internet, office and multimedia tasks (but not much in the way of video editing). Also, VirtualBox works fine on the ones with a bit more memory.
I've kept most of these machines fully upgraded for four months now, and have encountered very few problems which could be attributed directly to Arch. Some upstream issues, but no show-stoppers. However, you must carefully read the messages displayed by pacman as it upgrades (if necessary, browse /var/log/pacman.log), and note configuration file changes. Check for new or saved versions, with the extensions .pacnew and .pacsave respectively. I have found the pacdiffviewer (which comes with the yaourt package) and Kompare utilities invaluable for checking changes - most Arch upgrade problems are caused by carelessness with config file changes!
Generally, with the perpertually rolling release philosophy it's great to easily upgrade to recent versions of packages. My kernel upgrades have gone well too. There have only been one or two package niggles: the official Wine packages tends to lag a bit behind, but there are several alternative ways to keep it bang up to date, and I have successfully used community-built packages and easily compiled it myself (as I did for K3b). Find yourself an existing PKGBUILD file which you can tweak and the sky's the limit ...! Also, the Mozilla applications like Firefox are unbranded in a similar way to Debian's versions. But, I've always just downloaded the applications directly from Mozilla anyway (to make sure I have exactly the versions I want - for compatibility with portable Windows versions), so this is no hassle for me.
The Arch forums are overall very good, with useful advice offered pretty quickly. They're not quite as homely as MepisLovers, but that's understandable as Arch is quite a different beast from Mepis, with generally more technically proficient users. I'm very used now to Arch's "vanilla" (aka KISS) approach to things. While that may have a higher learning investment initially than other distros, I've found time saved in the long run by not having to work out what distro-specific "user-friendly" frontends are doing when things go wrong. Handholding is good only up to the point where it can become a liability.
Incidently, I was so scunnered by KDE4's initial releases, that I have even installed Arch + Gnome to a test partition, but loving Gnome will take a long time, if ever ...
Anyway, Arch is purring along so nicely on the whole, that it might even become a little boring!
