I was Nobara user, then I am using Fedora right now. I want to use things like Hyprland etc. and ya know, Its damn cool to say I am using arch btw. So I’ve decided to use Arch Linux. But everyone says its always breaking and gives problems. That’s because of users, not OS… right? I love to deal with problems but I don’t want to waste my time. Is Arch really problemful OS? Should I use it? I know what to do with setup/ usage, the hardness of Arch is not problem for me but I am just concerned about the mindset “Arch always gets broken”.
Who thinks that Arch always broke is one of the two:
- An user that is trying to mess with the system always; or
- A person that don’t know Arch and is repeating non-sense
My Arch install has almost 5 years and I never had an issue that was like “oh no! O need to reinstall everything!”
Interesting enough, when I was using release-based distros, almost every big update my system become unstable and I had to reinstall me whole system.
Agreed. I broke arch multiple times over the years. Once I learned to read the arch news, pay attention to the pacman log, and not just “yay - update complete” my way through updates - it’s been pretty solid for years. More so than the “stable, noob friendly distros”
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.
i think many people interpret “arch is unstable” as “arch breaks a lot” while it imho just means its bleeding edge and software is not only updated on upgrades but all the time. my arch installations did sometimes “break” but were much easier to recover than e.g. all the failed ubuntu upgrades which i had ni idea how tonfix without reinstalling. for me arch was the perfect learning distro and is now even easier to install since there is the archinstall script.
