Arch Linux

I had more problems on 'user-friendly' distros, than I had on Arch.

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.

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.

But everyone says its always breaking and gives problems. That’s because of users, not OS… right?

It's an exaggeration, it doesn't always break but yes it occasionally does. Any Arch user who tells you otherwise is lying or hasn't used Arch for very long yet.

That’s because of users, not OS… right?

No it's because of regressions in new releases. Arch relentlessly marches forward and always tries to give you the latest-and-greatest version of any package on your system. There is some testing done obviously, but it can never be ruled out that newer software contains new bugs and regressions that are not caught in testing, and that it ends up being released.

To give an example of such a regression, the past few weeks there have been some kernel releases with broken bluetooth support for the (very common) Intel AX200 chipset. It is fixed now, but if you wanted to use bluetooth, Arch was in fact broken for some time.

The fix is usually: temporarily rollback the offending packages until the issue is fixed upstream or until a workaround is found. It does mean you will occasionally have to spend some time diagnosing issues and checking user forums to see if other users are having the same problem.

sample size of 1, admittedly, but there's so few times I've managed to break arch - which I can't 100% attribute to myself.

Once the updates broke, somehow wiping bash -binary and kernel. Not entirely sure how or why, all I did was a normal pacman -Suy. I might have issued the pacman -command from a long path which didn't exist anymore, not sure if relevant or not. Hasn't happened since, so... dunno. It did spook me a bit, but nobody else at the time reported similar issues.

I've ran arch for years at work (webdevelopment, desktop and laptop), home server (irc shell, mumble, etc hosting) and now home desktop too (gaming, media, dualbooting with win10).

The home server has required a powerbutton -forced boot once or twice, many months of uptime & regular kernel updates can apparently mess something with networking and usb, so can't ssh in and keyboard doesn't get regognized when plugged in. So, you know, reboot after kernel updates? :D

It's always a good idea to check the website for breaking changes which require manually doing something, there has been a few along the years.

I love to deal with problems but I don’t want to waste my time.

Then Arch is not for you. The distro requires you to always be informed of the latest news regarding Arch before upgrading so you'll probably have to admin your system.

If you're not ready to do that then you should probably stay with Fedora.

My suggestion: run arch in a virtual machine and get familiar with it before installing it.