Here’s the thing: your answer is both invalidating and ignorant, and it shows a lack of understanding of what differentiates Arch from a stable distro.
My wifi, that had been working fine since I installed this computer in 2020, broke in kernel 6.11 and 6.12 because Arch pushed those updates.
Early plasma 6.0 releases were rough as balls for months, because Arch pushed those updates.
My bluetooth, that had been working since I installed this computer in 2020, started to randomly disconnect sometime last year due to buggy firmware updates because Arch pushed those updates.
Hell even plain old intel ethernet on my old system from 2014 suddenly started hanging up under load a year or two ago (never found the cause, did find a workaround).
None of these issues were a fault of my own, all I did was pacman -Syu, and none of this would happen on a stable distro. I’m not saying Arch is shit because of this, I’m saying: beware of what you are getting into when you choose Arch: for every single package on your system, you are effectively at the mercy of whatever “upstream” decides to shit out that week. Being delusional about that fact and having guys come crawling out of the woodworks everytime this is mentioned, saying platitudes like: “I nEvEr HaD aN iSsUe” doesn’t help anyone.
I’ve had my own issues with two different laptops over the years, and in that time I’ve seen multiple packaging/dependency issues hit a majority of Arch users. My own issues are often caused by bugs on the bleeding edge that users on a non-rolling distro dodge altogether. For me these have mostly been easy to resolve, but it’s a much different experience compared with “stable” distros, where similar changes that require manual intervention (ideally) happen at a predictable cadence, and are well-documented in release notes.
I still strongly prefer Arch, as I’ve hit showstoppers and annoyances with “stable” distros as well. I guess I’m saying I don’t really understand your responses, and why you seem so critical of user anecdotes in this space, when your original comment was a (perfectly fine) anecdote about how everything’s working for you. That’s great! But we can also point to many examples caused directly by bugs or dependency issues that only crop up in a rolling release. Taking all these data together, good and bad, pros and cons, working and not working, can help us learn and form a more complete picture of reality.
Here’s the thing: your answer is both invalidating and ignorant, and it shows a lack of understanding of what differentiates Arch from a stable distro.
None of these issues were a fault of my own, all I did was
pacman -Syu, and none of this would happen on a stable distro. I’m not saying Arch is shit because of this, I’m saying: beware of what you are getting into when you choose Arch: for every single package on your system, you are effectively at the mercy of whatever “upstream” decides to shit out that week. Being delusional about that fact and having guys come crawling out of the woodworks everytime this is mentioned, saying platitudes like: “I nEvEr HaD aN iSsUe” doesn’t help anyone.Yeah, neither does “eVeRyOnE wIlL hAvE pRoBlEmS”. Kinda a stupid thing to say, all things considered.
I’ve had my own issues with two different laptops over the years, and in that time I’ve seen multiple packaging/dependency issues hit a majority of Arch users. My own issues are often caused by bugs on the bleeding edge that users on a non-rolling distro dodge altogether. For me these have mostly been easy to resolve, but it’s a much different experience compared with “stable” distros, where similar changes that require manual intervention (ideally) happen at a predictable cadence, and are well-documented in release notes.
I still strongly prefer Arch, as I’ve hit showstoppers and annoyances with “stable” distros as well. I guess I’m saying I don’t really understand your responses, and why you seem so critical of user anecdotes in this space, when your original comment was a (perfectly fine) anecdote about how everything’s working for you. That’s great! But we can also point to many examples caused directly by bugs or dependency issues that only crop up in a rolling release. Taking all these data together, good and bad, pros and cons, working and not working, can help us learn and form a more complete picture of reality.