Package Management
The package management is superb. It really comes in to its own when you need to install a program for which there is no distro supported package. Writing a MKPKG script is much more straightforward than creating DEB packages or RPMs and it allows you to create a completely reversible "make install" in a fraction of the time, it even has built in support for source controlled software from git et al. It has a huge library of unsupported packages in the Arch User Repository, so the chances are that you don't need to write that script anyway.
The last problem I had with Arch was on a laptop I use for TV recording using mythtv. Instead of rolling back dozens of packages I was able to modify the source using an upstream proposed patch, verifying that it worked and giving upstream data about another configuration. This was all achieved using Arch's built in ABS, so it took little more than half an hour. Once upstream had pushed the patch it was childsplay to remove my modified package and install the supported package normally. On any other distro, getting my system working again would have taken much longer and waiting for the package maintainer to push any changes to my machine would likely have taken weeks if not months.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
