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?
I think the thing with Arch is that it’s very customizable, so it’s essentially as complicated as you make it. If you just install the base and Firefox and Libreoffice, and never mess with the AUR or touch anything else, then you’ll most likely never have much trouble. If you’re like me and you turn it into an unholy mishmash of base packages, AUR, flatpaks, Appimages, Docker containers, VMs and lashed-together Wine things, you’ll have a huge teetering pile of spinning plates that requires constant fiddling lol. But that is very much by design.
The stability of a distro usually has more to do with API and ABI stability than stability in terms of reliability. And a “stable” system can be unreliable.
That’s why RHEL forks are said to be compatible bug for bug. Because you don’t know if fixing the bug could have a cascading side effect for somebody’s very critical system.
Arch has been nothing but reliable for me. Does it doesn’t need fixing sometimes because the config format of some daemon changed, or Python or nodejs got updated and now my project doesn’t build? Absolutely not. But for me usually newer versions are better even if it needs some fixing, and I like doing it piecemeal rather than all at once every couple years.
Stable distributions are well loved for servers because you don’t want to update 2000 servers and now you’re losing millions because your app isn’t compatible with the latest Ruby version. You need to be able to reliably install and reinstall the same distro version and the same packages at the same versions over and over. I can’t deal with needing a new server up urgently and then get stuck having to fix a bunch of stuff because I got a newer version of something.
I use multiple distros regularly, for different purposes. Although lately Docker has significantly reduced my need for stable distros and lean more on rolling distros as the host.
Been running it for about 6 months now with no issues apart from a weird display issue when I go full screen in YouTube in Firefox on one display and the other display goes all white except for a couple of glitchy flickery areas, but I think that’s more Wayland/plasma 6 related.
I will say that I’ve worked with the Linux command line for years now so I may be slightly more technically capable with it in general than a complete newbie but I think most other people here on Lemmy have a similar level of experience as me.
Been very happy running Manjaro, which is based on Arch.
I’ve been running it for over 10 years now across a few different PCs and stability-wise has been a mixed bag for me.
First PC was unsurprisingly flaky. Nvidia optimus laptop where the optimus drivers were still being figured out for linux. So I was running the testing repo to get SOME semblance of usability. Plus a whole host of other issues.
Second PC was perfect, never had a single issue with stability the 7 or 8 years i used it. Still functions, but the graphics card was starting to struggle in games. So now it sits silent.
Latest one was perfect for a few years, but in the last few months has been getting weird. Some graphics driver/kernel issues (known bugs, now resolved). Plus other weirdness I thought was related but isn’t. Some applications just wouldn’t launch, or launched if I started them immediately after logging in, but not if i did anything else first. The plasma 6 update messed up a lot of stuff for me too. So just yesterday I reinstalled Arch to another SSD and symlinked some stuff and that has solved most of my issues. The thing is, it’s a bleeding edge rolling release distro. Sometimes things do break for me, but most of the time it’s fixed a few days later. What happened to me recently hasn’t been an issue since the old crappy laptop, and I am running a LOT of stuff from the AUR. So to summarise my essay, generally pretty stable lol.