Which respects? I'm interested to see your view on this- I still have Debian on here that I installed months ago but haven't used it because I really couldn't get on with apt.
The Arch repositories use a single package for, say, gnome-games where Debian would have gnome-games, gnome-games-data, gnome-games-dbg, and gnome-games-dev. This is claimed to reduce download bandwidth for minor code changes, but almost invariably doesn't because a new version of *-data is usually uploaded whenever the code changes. Additionally, this means that the amount of software available on Debian is a misleading statistic - I have about 21k packages available, but an inconsistent quantity of them are not discrete pieces of software and many of them are merely metapackages designed to depend on a group of stuff. Debian has a tool for installing groups of stuff - tasksel - and I feel that in many areas this should be used more in favour of metapackages.
Debian also has a slow package turnaround: for instance, Unstable has only just acquired packages for GNOME 2.18, and these are required to spend at least ten days in Unstable with no release-critical bugs reported before being moved into Testing. Consequently, I am running a mixture of
2.14, 2.16 and 2.18, although somehow nothing has managed to break yet. This slowness is a feature of Debian's extreme stability, which in Sarge (the Stable release before the current one) ensured that kernel 2.4 was installed by default and it shipped with something silly like GNOME
2.8 (in 2005.) Meanwhile, Arch apparently has the latest software all the time, which is good, but it also feels rather untested and raw, which is not as good.
Pacman, as it compares to Aptitude (the primary frontend for APT), certainly appears to be very fast. Unfortunately, when I was using it I received frequent 404s on the files it was downloading, as well as throttling to 2Mb/s. This was probably the mirror, but I can't tell. I was also annoyed by the confusing terminology in --help, which is sparse - I had to use another computer to look up the documentation to find out what "sync" meant. Aptitude uses a few simple operations - update, install, reinstall, upgrade, dist-upgrade and remove - which all do what they say except dist-upgrade, which does what the --help page says.
