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 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.
In your experience of use, has Arch been stable in its operation?
I use Arch since 2008 on multiple laptops and desktop PCs as well as multiple servers and it is the host system for my Docker-based selfhosting environment.
I never had any real issues.
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.
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.
I personally don’t use Arch, but I think the reason so many people find it stable in practice is because they know their system well. When something breaks or needs to be changed, they know which configuration file to edit, which package to {un,re,}install, what to look for in the AUR, etc., and they can usually avoid those things in the first place, because they went through a fairly hands-on install process, not to mention having the best Linux wiki in existence at their disposal.
On top of that, I think a lot of derivatives of Debian, including Ubuntu and all its derivatives, severely undermine their stability by providing custom configurations for or changes to software that are rarely documented and completely transparent to the user… until they break and leave no indication of how to fix them. Which is one reason why I ended up using base Debian.
I think you hit the nail on the head there. Arch users are the one that has successfully installed Arch and as a result, got more in-depth knowledge about their own installation.
