I have always been afraid to install Arch because they tell you it is difficult to install and unstable. I want a simple system following the KISS philosophy and install only what I need, which is little. I don’t need anything from the aur repository, for now. Just a year ago I installed Arch and there it is, no problems and doing every day pacman -Syu. It has been a real discovery for me, it’s the only distribution I’ve had this last year that hasn’t crashed. I didn’t expect it, but Arch has made me change my opinion and pay less attention to the opinions of “youtubers” and more to my own experience. In your experience of use, has Arch been stable in its operation?
Been very happy running Manjaro, which is based on Arch.
I had so many problems and had to constantly manage other distros before Arch that it was a lot of anxiety. Everytime new release of popular linux distro I knew it was gonna break if I tried to upgrade. Almost centrainly. For fear of that I had frankstein monster distro for work using lts version full of weird ppas with a more recent kernel and some more recent software that I need because everything was always old all the time. It was horrible to maintain and keep working.
Arch is just simpler, easier and much more stable. It’s just pacman -Syu all the time, have fresh software, recent kernels for the hardware improvements which is extremely important for when you buy new laptop and overall never crashes. It’s just a matter of reading the news, sometimes change a config that got deprecated, or replace some software that got abandoned or now there’s better alternative, etc. Sometimes things get some regressions for some weeks until things are bug reported and fixed upstream and eventually reach the system, but that’s waiting some weeks or rarely months. There’s always alternative to get involved in helping fix the problems with bug reports and patches if needed, but that’s extremely rare and only if you really are desperate.
Anyway, those problems were much worse on other “stable” distros, because if there’s something seriously wrong on the system you are only lucky to get fixes after a major release which may happen only once a year.
If the system is really critical and cannot fail me during work week I delay updating to the weekend sometimes. Even if I need to it’s just a matter of evaluating the risk. You do pacman -syu and see what’s comming. If it’s just some apps updating then it’s ok to do it. If it’s core system stuff like kernel, systemd, dbus, graphics drivers, maybe I’ll avoid it.
Overall it’s simpler and easier because there’s really only 1 or 2 things to keep in mind and all the rest just falls into place.
Using archlinux for more than 15 years on personal machines and maybe 5+ years on work computers.
I have had the same Arch install for years where Ubuntu on the other hand breaks after 2-3 major version upgrades from accumulated cruft.
It is important to keep Arch updated but sometimes I go a month or two without doing it.
Occasionally they have some update that’s not backwards compatible and you have to be a bit careful about it but if it breaks someone already has the answer on the forums from earlier that week. You can also install “informant” which displays the latest arch news post before installing because they usually warn you when there’s a breaking change.
I have one computer in my house that has been running the same installation of Arch for eight years. I occasionally upgrade hardware components as needed, and will eventually take a full disk image and transfer it to an entirely new system once I’ve reached the limit of how much I can ship-of-Theseus it.
Never had a single problem with it in all that time.
Not quite Arch, but I’ve been running EndeavourOS without any issues. It’s been super stable! The only time I’ve had issues is when I’ve messed with the system.