I can affirm that. I don't understand how Arch gets this reputation for breaking during an upgrade. In the four years I've been using Arch on a variety of systems, I've never had anything break in a way that didn't have a trivial, obvious fix, and most of the time pacman points out potential problems during the upgrade. Arch has allowed me to spend way less time on system administration than I used to before I switched. Are people doing "sudo make install" or running binary driver installers as root? Or maybe it's because I switched right after the systemd transition and missed all the fun? Maybe I'm just lucky?

Do you understand the difference between Arch and distros like Debian? When GNOME ships a new version, it almost immediately hits the Pacman repos. Do that for every package and you're going to have integration issues. Your users also get to be the guinea pigs for new releases. Ship buggy packages and sooner or later your users' systems will install a critical package with bugs. This is why Arch gets "this reputation for breaking during an upgrade." And yes, you're just lucky. When I hear Arch users saying "it hasn't broken for me!" I hear "my girlfriend and I don't use protection, and she's never gotten pregnant!"

Right, this is what people always say about Arch. And yet, in practice, on a variety of hardware, I've had nary a problem in the four years I've been using it. Contrast this with big-release distros, where I've literally never had a successful upgrade between major versions. But maybe the key point is in your second sentence. I've never had a problem with Gnome breaking because I have no interest in running a DE, and even on those systems where I've got one installed, I boot to the console and start i3 or sway. If Gnome was broken, I'd never notice.

And this might be the key point: if a package like Gnome is broken, I personally blame the package rather than the OS. I don't see a GUI desktop as integral to the operating system, so when I say that Arch has been trouble-free, I mean that I'm always able to boot to a usable system console and get my work done. So that's my disclaimer, and probably the big reason people shouldn't use Arch: if you rely on a DE, and see the system as broken without one, you're probably going to experience way more breakage than I've reported.

Fair enough, every time I've used Arch I've gotten burned by an update 2-3 months in, ranging from annoyances to an unusable system. I like to think I'm pretty good with Linux having used it on the desktop and sysadmining for a long time, but I put Arch in the same category as Gentoo, cool but too finicky and fragile.

> it almost immediately hits the Pacman repos.

I tried Arch and it's not the case, my examples:

PostgreSQL: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.6/static/release-9-6-2.htm... 9.6.2 released 2017-02-09, in Arch repos - https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/log/trunk?h=... - almost a MONTH later. 9.6 released 2016-09-29, in Arch repos - 2016-10-29 (version 9.6.1, they skipped 9.6) - again, a MONTH later.

Had issues with outdated Node.js and some other package I can't recall.

To be honest, up to date packages for me were only available with brew in macOS.

There's a difference between running on the [testing] repos, which do what you say, and the regular default repos, which wait for packages to graduate from [testing] before rolling them out.

Only a small percentage of packages go through [testing]. Typically only when problems are expected. [community] and [extra] require no testing, just that the packager says "good enough for me." [core] is held to higher standards.