I have never had Arch break during an update. I’ve never had it crash. I’ve never encountered an issue I couldn’t resolve, and for that matter I don’t really encounter issues. Usually the only problems are that I haven’t installed a service that would usually come standard with another OS, so I have to check the wiki, install, and configure something.
I haven’t had Arch break during an update, but I always check the home page first, there are absolutely times my system would have broken during a blind update.
Arch doesn’t support blind updates - it explicitly tells you to always check the home page before an update in case “out-of-the-ordinary” user intervention is required. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance
Basically, don’t run arch unless you’re willing to be a Linux system admin.
I see. I asked because “stable” means different things in different distros. In Debian it means that interfaces and functionality in one version doesn’t change. If I set up a script that interacts with the system in various ways, parsing output, using certain binaries in certain ways etc, I should be able to trust that it works the same year after year with upgrades within the same release. To some people this is important, to some people it isn’t.
