Yah, agreed. I've used arch for a long time as well, and gentoo before it. I've actually had less breakage with gentoo back in the day.

Their notification system for breaking changes is truly awful (or rather, does not exist). I've been bitten 3 times, each taking a few hours+ and a lot of reading to figure out. I find all of the things you're supposed to "just know" or check before running a `pacman -Syu` to be pretty silly. The official attitude towards these sorts of issues appear to be dismissive, which is what convinced me to finally drop it.

You could set up a nice backup and restore system in less than 3 hours to make sure that software upgrade issues never affect your professional work work. I have that for my personal hobby work even though 6 years Arch have made me appreciate the most stable and predictable system I ever used.

Ugh I remember using btrfs for this. It was never worth the effort and I would have a bunch of little paper cuts or a full drive very quickly.