Best (and worst)( distros for software development

[Kyle]

Not sure what would be causing your problem. It talks here, installed to a flash drive. Did you do

alsactl -f /var/lib/alsa/asound.state store

before rebooting your system? Also, did you add speakup and speakup_soft to your MODULES array and alsa and espeakup to your DAEMONS array in /etc/rc.conf? These seem rather obvious, but considering I missed one of these steps in my installation, I thought I'd ask just to be sure.

There are indeed some issues with GRUB2, likely on any distribution that is using it. I have seen a lot of GRUB2 issues for people using it on Ubuntu as well, so Arch is not the only distribution having issues there. Considering that GRUB2 has been considered alpha for years until very recently, I would recommend using Syslinux unless there is a specific feature of GRUB2 that you need. Syslinux is much easier to install and most of the time it just works. I had absolutely no trouble at all installing the newest talking Arch once I partitioned my disk to include a 100 MB ext2 /boot and installed Syslinux as my bootloader.

As for development packages, Arch has lots of things in AUR if they aren't already in the official repos, and if something you need isn't there, submitting the new package build is extremely easy, as is creating it. I have worked with rpm and deb packages, and they are both rather complicated compared to Pacman package builds, which are relatively simple Bash scripts.

For best results developing software, if Arch is just not for you, my recommendation is a Debian-based distribution, more for the total number of available packages than anything else. Debian Unstable, in spite of its volatile name, doesn't usually suffer from very much breakage, and I successfully kept a Debian Unstable system up and running for about 2 years before migrating to Ubuntu and then to Arch. I hope some of this information is just a bit helpful.
~Kyle