Hello everyone, lately I got really into Linux. I installed it in every machine I have, but I still had to try Arch. From what people were saying online I thought that it was going to be a hard and impossible task. So I bought a Thinkpad for a hundred euros (x260 if you’re wondering) and I followed a guide on how to install Arch. I thought I was going to be using the terminal all the time, and had to type everything. No black screen of death, no prompt saying “Are you awake?” Matrix style, the pc didn’t breack, reality didn’t bend and just following simply the guide I had Arch running in fifhteen-twenty minutes no problem. Only the Network Manager wasn’t on were I rebooted after installation but it took five minutes to search online how to fix it. Everything works: bluetooth, internet, apps and so on. I could leave it as it is and I could just use it as any other pc. So all I’m saying is that I’m having a great time with Linux distros, the pain to learn how install repository and other things is really worth it. Every time I learn something more about my computer puts me more in control. So thank you Linux and its community.
The reason people say that Arch is unstable is that you are expected to read the news on the website before every update or else your system is liable to be broken – and sometimes it will break in spite of that. Oh, and the expectation is that you’ll be updating multiple times per week, and if you don’t, you will soon be in a situation where to install any package you must update your entire system.
Most other distros place no such expectations on the user.
I would also add that it heavily depends on the setup a user is running. I had been running Arch with XFCE and dwm for years on a machine with a Nvidia card and I can count the number of issues I had which were not induced by my wrong-doing with three fingers. When I switched to Plasma Wayland on my new machine I faced more issues in one and a half years than with my old setup. Also, none of these issues were mentioned on the news section but were due to Plasma updates. There are just too many moving parts under heavy development with such a big DE and Wayland is also not quite 100% there yet, so for some people it can seem like Arch is rather unstable although it still is a heavy generalisation.
I’ve been using Arch for over 15 years, and honestly, I never check the news before updating. Once in a while, I’ll get an error — maybe once a year — and the fix is always just running a quick command I find on the Arch site or the package page. Takes seconds, no drama.
I’ve only managed to break my system twice, and both times were 100% my fault. Even then, recovery was easy: just chroot in and run one command.
As for updates, doing them regularly (daily, weekly, or monthly) is recommended. No need to go crazy with updates. Too frequent updates are actually discouraged. Arch is a rolling release, so your packages and dependencies get updated together — meaning things don’t randomly break. Skipping updates won’t nuke your system either, and if something ever goes sideways, you can just downgrade and be back up in no time.
This has been my exact experience as well. I run updates whenever I log into the machine. Sometimes daily other times monthly depending on the computer, and very rarely have I run into errors.
To be fair, you don’t need to update your system to install a package, all you need to do is run the update command just to sync up the database, then cancel out when prompted.
I’ve gone multiple weeks/months without updating and everything was fine.
That’s called a partial update and is strongly discouraged by the Arch Linux documentation.
One time I did not update an arch system for something like 6 months… You can’t immagine the troubles I needed to go through to get it into a working state.
Interesting. I once didn’t update the arch system on my laptop for several years, while it was sitting in a drawer. Had to manually update the keychain but besides that the update just worked