Arch Linux is a meme but also a really solid distro. I'm writing this from a 2+ year old Arch install that has had basically 0 stability issues. "Rolling release" gets an undeserved bad reputation in my opinion, and many arch packages aren't as bleeding edge as you'd expect.
Compared to Ubuntu where I'd often have major issues in between releases, I don't think I could ever go back.
I've been running Arch for about a decade now and it's only seriously broken a few (low single digits) times. Here are the main failure modes I've experienced:
The biggest one seems to be something related to the package mirrors only partially updating, or updates of common dependencies not being atomically applied to all packages - something like that. If you do a pacman -Syu in the middle of the critical time period, the system will fail to work with some core libs (libc, libicu) not being compatible. Booting into a recovery session and doing pacman -Syu again fixes it. However, it's been years since I experienced this - maybe they've taken some steps to eliminate this failure mode?
The other big (but still rare) failure mode is bugs in the kernel. The fix is simple, keep linux-lts installed alongside the standard linux kernel, so you can always boot into lts from the bootloader if the regular kernel doesn't work.
User software can have bugs in newer releases, but they're usually minor - you'll still be able to get work done without much disruption. And that's not really an Arch issue. Unless the bug is reported & fixed very quickly, Ubuntu/Fedora are likely to also get the buggy versions, just later.
Aside from the first failure mode, the OS itself doesn't fail. I've had bad experiences with upgrading between major releases of distros like Ubuntu. They're bloated to begin with, and accumulate more cruft over time and major upgrades. Arch just works. Plus, there's lots of software in the official repos, and the AUR / package build system is also excellent - far superior to the whole PPA mess on Debian/Ubuntu, and the equivalent on Fedora.
>User software can have bugs in newer releases, but they're usually minor - you'll still be able to get work done without much disruption. And that's not really an Arch issue. Unless the bug is reported & fixed very quickly, Ubuntu/Fedora are likely to also get the buggy versions, just later.
And this is the thing people ignore when they say they have no issues with cutting edge (not necessarily rolling release, which can be stable) distributions. Note that I'm not egging on you, if you're happy with the way your system works and manages software updates there's nothing wrong with that.
The software that makes up the distribution is as critical as the distribution itself. When you use cutting edge software you roll along with the issues new software introduces as soon as they're introduced. This has a plethora of effects including temporary breakage, feature removal that gets later reconsidered, config files that no longer work (or do different things) from one day to the next, and similar things.
While stable distributions do eventually inherit the software anyway, they generally do so at a later patch release. They'll go from 2.3.6 to 2.3.7 while waiting for the newest 2.4.0 release to get itself together. When necessary, downstream patches are used to apply fixes from newer releases without directly upgrading to a whole new version. This makes for a much slower rate of change in general, and as such a much slower rate of breakage. One can work around a specific set of bugs, but when that set of bugs changes every other day, that's harder and more time consuming to deal with.
Personally I prefer this latter approach, mostly as it allows me to choose when things may break (i.e. when upgrading between releases). Gentoo is currently the distro that provides me this choice, allowing me to pick between stable and bleeding edge releases on a per-package basis, hold back updates without causing library linking issues, and allowing me to install packages without syncing the entire repository and upgrading everything. This allows me to set some time apart to upgrade my system and be able to deal with whatever broke this time.
My system's most recent breakage came in the form of adwaita-icon-theme removing all the remaining non-symbolic icons, causing some programs to now lack their icons.
I use arch for my personal machines and work gives me debian. Yes, there are bugs, i usually see them (a lot of them are obvious in KDE) on arch from month 0 to month 1, then if I'm unlucky (depending on when the bug appeared) I'm stuck with them from month 6 to month 12 on my work machine. Very "stable" indeed, it just means I get to see some bugs for much longer and on a delayed time table. It's very rare that anyone goes back and fixes minor bugs like these in the delayed debian packages. Just because something is released on a slower cadence with a bigger delay to release doesn't mean it has fewer bugs.
On the other hand, I had way more instances of a broken system and broken packages (where synaptic/apt just refuses to install anything) on my work computer that has debian than I ever had with arch.
Many people don't realize that Arch is basically just providing the latest stable release from upstreams, nothing more and nothing less.
Most projects do testing before making a release of course, and for lots of software releases are very reliable. The kernel is an example of this, where Arch packages the most recent "stable" kernel rather than sticking to an LTS version. There is nothing "unstable" about this, in the sense of "unstable" meaning unreliable or buggy.
The key thing is that "stable" and "unstable" have practically nothing to do with the quality or reliability of the distro. Unstable only means that the packages may update in non-backwards compatible ways, so you need to be prepared to make changes to accommodate that. Normally it's something like updating a configuration file, or passing different flags to a command line program, or something along those lines. Maybe you run some sort of service that links to shared libraries on the system, you need to be prepared to relink to updated versions or not depend on system-wide versions at all.
So long as you make sure to keep up with changes, rolling release distros are exactly as reliable as upstream releases.
The other thing to note is that tracking releases may actually end up being more reliable, because you are constantly getting bug fixes and improvements!
The word "stable" can have different meanings, e.g. stable behavior/stable interfaces. I am using arch/manjaro on my personal machine, but I installed Debian for some of my remote family members (who mostly just need firefox+libreoffice+vlc+cups) since this makes me confident that they can get periodic security updates and bugfixes all by themselves without needing my intervention (while rolling releases sometimes require some adjustments or troubleshooting e.g. on the config files, etc).
Arch has been working great for me on both my ancient laptop and my Ryzen PC for ages now. And whenever I do run into a problem or want to learn something new, I've always got the truly excellent Arch Wiki to back me up. Even those running a different distribution will often refer to it to solve a problem.
I expect even greater things from Arch in the future with Valve's use of this distro on the Steam Deck.
I moved to Arch last week because I did not have a USB drive large enough for the new Ubuntu install iso and they did not provide a net installer either (it is a new PC). The silliest reason, but now I find Arch lovely and everything works for me (including typically fragile things). Weird how such a silly thing led to switching away after 15 years as an Ubuntu user.
> "Rolling release" gets an undeserved bad reputation in my opinion
Totally undeserved IME.
For me, Arch and Manjaro, both rolling, have always been more stable than Ubuntu has ever been. At this point, I've used all three for about an equal amount of time (~2 years). On Ubuntu, 4ish years ago, my DE and stuff crashed a LOT. Hardly ever happened on either Manjaro or Arch.
It makes some kind of sense: DE devs, for example, are banging away on the latest version of their software. They'll even ask you to upgrade your DE to the latest version to see if you can reproduce an issue you found on an older version for whatever your Ubuntu snapshot is using. Paradoxically, newer software seems to have less bugs.
I'm really irritated by Arch's meme status, because it's genuinely a solid distro and out of all the weird Linux workstations I've spun up over the years, my Arch workstations have given me the least trouble. Manjaro, being Arch with batteries included, is an excellent starting point.
Honestly the most useful thing about Arch is the documentation. The Arch Wiki is a fantastic resource for all sorts of common Linux utilities, worth a read even if you use a different distro.
I installed Ubuntu on my local server at home. A few weeks later I had issues with installing packages because Snap was enabled by default. I don't know what was configured wrong on my server but I managed to install 2 versions of the same firefox package from Snap, one using snap and the other using apt.
It broke the whole system so I decided to just remove snaps as a whole.
I run Arch Linux daily since 2019 and the only problems I had that I can remember are setting up dual-GPU on laptops and dealing with dual boot issues - whenever my laptop had a BIOS update on Windows, my BIOS settings would be reverted to the default, so the F1-12 keys acted as fn keys by default (e.g. pressing F5 wouldn't refresh a web page), Windows overwrote the bootloader on my boot partition so I had to reinstall GRUB/systemd-boot every time this happened and it also changed the SATA mode for the laptop which made it impossible to locate the Linux partition on my HDD unless I switched it back to AHCI (default was Intel RST + Optane).
The other issue I recently had with Arch which I think it's more related to the software and not the distro itself is that occasionally my Latte Dock will crash, but that's about it.
I ran Arch for about six months back in 2021 on a Thinkpad. As I recall the mouse driver would reset like once a day. I'd be mousing around and suddenly the pointer would teleport to the top-left corner. And the wifi would intermittently slow way down until I restart it.
So I switched to Ubuntu. And the wifi troubles continued. But the mouse troubles went away.
Using Arch is a dream compared to things like Ubuntu for me. PPAs and release cycles made upgrades awkward on Ubuntu. I've been a user for 3 years on my work laptop and have had everything be almost completely painless. (One time yay broke something and a python module had to be removed lol)
Arch works fine but sometimes I think I might prefer something like Debian Stable + Flatpak because the repos are frozen. Since Arch doesn't support partial upgrades, you have to upgrade the whole system every time a repo list refresh is required, basically. So some days after the last upgrade, some package you want to install is bumped, and a repo refresh list is required, which wouldn't be a problem in Debian. But Arch is rock solid and the AUR for obscure packages is something Debian doesn't have. I might be wrong about this opinion about partial upgrades etc, somebody let me know.
I may need to trailblaze development on a Linux VM at a new job because my rural DSL isn't up to the task of doing everything on my local MacBook like all the other devs. I have a lot of experience with Arch on desktops and laptops. I was leaning towards Ubuntu just due to a vague sense that "more of the important stuff will 'just work' " but do you think Arch might be a better call?
Same here, every system is different, but my main desktop Arch installation is kicking since 6 years now with absolute minimal maintenance issues. Perhaps 1-2 times per year maximum things need to be fixed manually in super rare cases.
Arch is my ideal distro, but since my motherboards started using UEFI I just haven't been able to install it. I followed the instructions from the Install Wiki[0], but just couldn't figure it out. Manjaro's been a nice in-between with a painless installation process
That may be a good idea, but I honestly haven't looked into it. My preference is for operating systems to just work, rather than me change all my motherboards to accommodate them
Arch does "just work" it's more of an issue with booting from a live image you are encountering by the sounds of things. Ironically your preferred OS is derivative of Arch and considered less stable by many users of both systems.
Writing from a Arch system I installed on 2017-12-04 and use as my daily driver, I've been moving the hard drive from laptop to laptop over time and the system from drive to drive when upgrading. Prior to that, I had been using Gentoo for years which is also great.
Compared to Ubuntu where I'd often have major issues in between releases, I don't think I could ever go back.