Distro Focuses

I’ve never had any issues with my Arch install being unpredictable. It has always worked exactly as I expected it to, even though I update it every couple of days.

It has always worked exactly as I expected it to
Just expect it to break, then it will behave as expected taps head
- Well I set up automated timeshift on btrfs, so maybe that’s why it’s playing nice.
I've been using Arch since 2014. If I could be arsed, I could write you a looooooooong list of regressions I've had to deal with over the years. For an experienced Linux user, they're usually fairly easy to deal with, but saying you never have to deal with anything is just a lie.
My experience with Arch is basically: it's all very predictable until it isn't and you suddenly find yourself troubleshooting something random like unexplainable bluetooth disconnects caused by a firmware or kernel update.
- What you've said is true, though it's a bit of a trade-off -- over the years I've wasted so many hours with those "user friendly" distros because I need a newer version of a dependency, or I need to install something that isn't in the repos. Worst case I have to figure out how to compile it myself.
  It's very rare to find something that isn't in the Arch official repos or the AUR. Personally I've found that being on the bleeding edge tends to save me time in the long run, as there's almost no barriers to getting the packages that I need.
  
  What you’ve said is true, though it’s a bit of a trade-off
  Yes, and that's why after more than 10 years I still use Arch. I like having the latest version of things and I'm confident enough in my abilities that I know that if something breaks I can always either find a fix, or at least identify the offending package, hold it back, report the bug and wait for the issue to be resolved.
  There are times where it can be trying though. The first plasma 6 releases for example were rough. More recently, I've also been having issues with 6.11 and 6.12 kernels and my ax200 wifi that I only recently found a fix to. My wifi would freeze whenever I started streaming video from the PC to my TV, but only in kernels after 6.11. Turning off TCP segmentation offloading with ethtool resolved it (ethtool -K wlan0 tso off). You don't want to know how long I had been pulling my hair out at that issue until I found the fix.
- Did you consider that the problems you have might not be problems that other people experience? I very highly doubt our two systems are at all similar. Your experience is just that, yours, and so you don’t have any right to be arbitor over whether or not I’m lying.
  
  That's such a cop-out answer and totally missing the point. I've run Arch on 4 different systems, and yes I had different issues on each and sometimes issues that hit across the board.
  At the end of the day, whether or not this was just my personal experience doesn't matter. What matters is that the issues were always caused by what Arch is: a unstable rolling release distro that pushes out the latest version of upstream packages, bugs and all. Sooner or later some will hit you, telling yourself and other people otherwise is deluding yourself and those people.
  
  Yeah, and sooner or later, I’ll die of old age, or cancer, or an accident, or get audited on my taxes.
  None of those things have happened yet either. Not only that, but the same is true for every operating system that has ever existed, or will ever exist, including every distro of Linux.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  I'm so critical not of other anecdotes, but of a comment that explicitly stated I was lying, and that there was no chance I could possibly have had a perfect experience so far with Arch. He didn't infer, he didn't imply, he straight up said I was lying. That's literally the words he used.
  Of course I'm going to be critical of that.
  
  I see. The word lie is strong, and it's entirely within the realm of possibility that you never had any issues arise with your install. I see your point, and apologize for perhaps a bit of grandstanding on my behalf. I was more focused on the pros/cons of different types of distros, and missed the reason why you were acting defensively.
  I feel this kind of conversation still isn't super helpful though (for either of you). I mean it clearly can be true that one person (or one chunk of the community) has no issues, while another person (and maybe another good chunk of the community) does have issues. Though perhaps in getting involved, I haven't really helped either.
Do you use your computer for things that rely on specific library versions and functionality?
imagine if you update it after 2 weeks. Arch is okay, if you keep backups. otherwise, you are basically playing a russian roulette
- I don’t like waiting that long, because sitting for an hour while it recompiles everything that updated is annoying. I like the daily or so updates that only take a couple minutes.

What? I love Arch, it's so god damn stable and fast.

absolutely not. look at nixos.

Once i get another machine to dick around on ill try installing arch.

i started learning about linux 4 months ago. Installed Arch with archinstall pretty easily to a VM, it booted up no problem. But you have to manually install the desktop, if you want a gui (who doesn't lol). But there are many desktops for Arch, the most common ones have pretty good documentation. But if i were you, i'd experiment with some more niche desktop emviroments
- I haved used many distros and DEs. my favorites are keyboard driven like i3 and such. For now i use fedora because i needed something to work out of the box. I would like to stay in the terminal.
  
  i tried lxqt and gnome. those were disappointments. And i used kde and cinnamon too, those are good
  
  Nice i like lxqt but dont use it currently
- No need to manually install desktop environments, archinstall also does that (Profile --> Desktop).
  
  i didn't have that option in Archinstall
  
  You did, probably just didn't see it ;) It's been part of it for years, since around 2020 according to GitHub. But to be fair, calling the option "Profile" might not be very intuitive for some people, so it's easy to miss.
  
  i checked every option. maybe it was an old version or a modified one
Just use kvm/qemu and install it. When I want to play with detailed setups I install slackware and start configuring/compiling.
- yeah i could do that. When i installed it i had a problem booting logging in, it wouldn't goto the DE.