Debian and Arch Linux are on the extreme opposite ends of the spectrum, in pretty much all the areas. One is an orthodox stability focuses distro and the other is a cutting edge rolling release distro.
Both these distros are very different from each other except for the fact that they both are Linux based and awesome.
Debian and Arch Linux have a very huge community and a following. Millions of people use these distros. But which among them is the best? Which among them is more suitable for you? Let's find out.
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Debian is a very heavy system by default. It comes with a huge number of software preinstalled. Arch Linux, on the other hand, is extreme bare bones distro which doesn't even come with a graphical desktop environment by default. You install everything explicitly and only the stuff you want gets on your computer. This makes Arch Linux feel slightly more snappy than Debian. But this snappiness in only limited to faster app launches and window responsiveness and not actual faster processing. Games and heavy applications perform great on both the distros
well, Debian is as stable as it gets. In fact, I wouldn't be wrong in saying that Debian is the most stable Linux distro out there. That's precisely why it is the professionals choice for deployment on servers and production environments. With Debian, the software are tested extensively and the whole process of updating packages is done through a very lengthy and thorough process.
This means Debian might have slightly older packages but Debian's stability and dependability become unquestionable.
Arch on the other hand is a rolling release with updates being pushed pretty much every day. It has the newest packages and the cutting edge technology incorporated into it before you can experience it on any other distro.
Now, this doesn't mean that Arch Linux is less dependable. No Sir. Arch Linux team still pushes updates after deep testing and confirmed stability. I've used Arch and Arch based distros for a long time and there hasn't been a single incidence of an update breaking something except one where an openSSl update had broken a number of steam games.
Personally, I'd totally recommend Arch for home computers and Students, but for developers and computers running critical operations, Debian is the obvious choice.
Debian has more than a staggering 51000 packages in its official repositories. That is a really huge number. Pretty much anything that exists for Linux can be found here. Except for proprietary software. Proprietary software like NVIDIA drivers have a very complicated way of installation and dealing with it all can be a hassle. Still, there's only one other Linux distro which can beat the sheer size of Debian official repositories.
Talking about Arch Linux, it too has a huge official repository consisting of a ton of software. But when you compare that to Debian, the arch software have much newer version numbers. To give you a scale of their size, The official trusted repos of both Arch and Debian are bigger than the official free repos of Ubuntu.
Although Arch Linux is a staunch supporter of free and open source software, it still includes proprietary software in its repositories. This can be a huge boon for some people and installing official drivers for GPU's becomes really simple.
And let's not forget the Arch User Repositories or the AUR. Now AUR is the community maintained pool of each and every piece of Linux software. There's pretty much everything in there.
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