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.
How do you define “stable”?
“Ability to reboot without breaking a sweat”
Low occurence of notable bugs during daily use.
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.
Stable doesn’t mean that the OS doesn’t break, but that the way it functions doesn’t change.
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.