The “Arch breaks all the time” people have obviously never used Arch.
I’ve run Arch as a daily driver for the last 4 and a half years and haven’t had any issues. I’ve tried Pop_OS twice in that time and had install-breaking issues within a week in both cases.
🔥 🔥 🔥
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YMMV
I run Manjaro with KDE on X11… I use a lot of mouse gestures, so I can’t sit with Wayland.
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I found the SYSTEM is extremely stable for ME. It is important to say this every time…
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I find KDE is often less stable… I had at least 2 issues I couldn’t explain/understand and just fixed with restoring contents of .config from snapshots.
This is one area where Manjaro ‘held back’ and did actually save us from a lot of the bleeding edge (5.26 was a rough ride)… but that’s not an ‘Arch’ issue, that’s a ‘KDE’ issue.
But the USER likes to tip the boat until it does a barrel roll, or sinks entirely… and this is mostly what divides the happy users. Sometimes it’s just basic hardware, sometimes it’s the USER habits/modus operandi.
So we have Snapshots, and we have rsync backups to a mounted drive… Then it matters not - a quick restart fixes most issues, and a reinstall takes only 6 minutes with no data lost -> in backups.
That’s stable enough for me.
BTW, I use AUR quite a lot - and it never actually caused me an issue, other than some stuff needing rebuilds.
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the subtle difference is that distros like Pop try hard to aim at home computer normie users or new to Linux, Arch doesn’t. 99% of Arch fault cases are also user’s fault.
Can confirm, I am a dumbass often.
Imma be real… Arch has been the most consistent system I’ve used to date.
I’ve been using linux off and on since like 2008. I jumped around from ubuntu, fedora, opensus, popOS, centOS, etc… I’ve had manjaro and now arch as my daily driver for probably 4 or more years now and Arch updates have only ever broke one thing, one time, and it was more of a audio pipewire issue than it was really archs fault.
arch updates do not deserve this slander, its been very reliable for me, more than probably any system i’ve ever used.
Arch has only broken for me because I’m an idiot.
Coincidentally enough, Fedora has only broken for me because I am an idiot.
Usually when things I own or use break it’s because I’m an idiot lol.
I’ve definitely seen stuff break because of an update to arch. there was an issue a while back where KDE plasma and xorg together would cause taskbar icons to be absolutely massive. a subsequent update fixed that.
the thing is, if my gaming PC is unusable, it’s not a big deal cause I don’t need it for anything. that’s why I run arch on it
Interesting. I’ve been running Arch/KDE for years and never saw that bug. I use Arch on almost everything.
Steam Deck comes with kinda-Arch, I use Arch for work now, I use it on my gaming PC. The only thing that doesn’t run it is my home server because it sits in a corner and doesn’t need bleeding edge updates or the AUR.
For all the memes, Arch has not once broken on me.
It’s the trade off of having a mostly bleeding edge operating system. It’s part of the reason why I wouldn’t recommend Arch to beginners. While pretty rare, some update will eventually break part of your OS or cause other (often minor) issues and you should be knowledgeable enough/willing to look up the offending package and roll it back. It’s up to the user to decide whether Arch’s pros (massive software availability through official repos and the AUR, DIY approach, up-to-date packages) outweigh its cons.
As @TheAgeOfSuperboredom@lemmy.ca said (I can’t tell if jokingly or not - lol), it is somewhat expected that an Arch user checks the Latest News section on archlinux.org before updating their system. Though I might add, I usually don’t bother.
I’ll take rolling updates over twice a year major release upgrades any day. My experience with Centos and Ubuntu was that anytime I needed to upgrade the OS, I had to spend a few hours fixing random stuff. Never had a problem with Arch that I couldn’t fix.
