this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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Arch Linux
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The beloved lightweight distro
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Arch is not at all problematic, however if you're still inexperienced with Linux in general, there might be smaller issues with some packages which might be unsolvable or hard to solve in that particular case (but any experienced user can easily solve those by e.g. downgrading the problematic package until a fix is available, or by restoring a filesystem snapshot). My current Arch installation is almost 5 years old and I only had a couple of very minor individual package update issues, and one time where the system couldn't boot anymore after an update, which could be desastrous for a newbie, but only for a newbie. So, any talk about Arch being unstable is most likely exaggerated. Windows 11 these days has more update failures than Arch, and Arch updates almost daily. Yes, Arch is not "perfectly stable" due to it being rolling release and receiving updates almost daily, but on the desktop or notebook that "less-than-perfect-stability" really doesn't matter much unless you have some kind of allergy against breaking changes or spending 15-30min to fix something or get annoyed if you have to reboot. The fast updates and generally very up to date packages generally more than make up for the disadvantages. At least on the desktop and notebook. I'm not sure if I could recommend Arch on servers. Also, you should at least update Arch once a week (or more often). If you don't update for multiple weeks, then updates might fail because Arch assumes that everyone is on or close to the most current updates. Or you might have to first update the pacman-keyring before updates work again. In any case, updating often is also a way to keep Arch more stable. If you don't like updating often, don't use Arch.