For a long time before using arch I thought too that rolling release might be more unstable, but I have come to the conclusion that quite the opposite might be true.
This assertion makes no sense. Debian Stable has always the paragon of stability to the point that it's actually criticised for it. The Debian Testing release is even famous for being more solid than other distro's stable releases.
Breaking changes in Debian are practically only remotely possible in Debian Unstable or if you purposely install packages from backports or PPA repositories that have no assurance of stability or even maintenance.
Maybe you meant debconf? When I was a DD it was an RC bug if your package used debconf to do "magic", i.e. using it as a registry for an application, or not properly re-seeding answers from the configuration and assuming the debconf db was the source of truth.
That's a fist-full of caveats. Arch is willing to upgrade the kernel, maybe you should include a dist-upgrade in the comparison.
I can plan for it? You can see if you're upgrading your kernel. Nothing breaks if you decide not to run an upgrade.
This nonsense is why stable and LTS releases were introduced in the first place.
If I'm faced with a major upgrade of an LTS system, I usually choose to reinstall from scratch, shedding packages I haven't needed for a long time with it. But that happens every couple years or so.
If you're okay with hitting the forums now and then to find out why your desktop has been behaving oddly the last two weeks, rolling is your thing. You won't have to break in your new dist-upgraded or freshly installed system for like two weeks.
If you don't want to play lottery every time you hit enter for that update or if you're a business where you can't afford possibly breaking all your laptops for some security update, stable is your only option.
It's "choose the best tool for the job" I guess.
This goes back to my original point, which we've drifted a little from.
Ubuntu has more unexpected behaving when upgrading than Debian.
A working dist-upgrade should not be something that your OS struggles to provide. Asking people to reinstall their OS isn't an acceptable answer.
Upgrading should not be a lottery.
This argument that you MUST dist-upgrade as soon as the next version is available, and completely ignore the entire idea around LTS, is silly.
This idea that you never want to upgrade from one LTS to the next is equally ridiculous. Upgrading the operating system is part of the package manager's job.
I like Linux, I don't dislike dealing with the OS. But I want to deal with it on my time. Expecting to get work done and then realizing something is broken and being forced to deal with it is a completely different proposition from picking out a weekend to reinstall your work PC with the newest LTS version.
I went through some hell when I ran Gentoo unstable(~) but for the past several years I've been on Gentoo stable and have very few issues. I've even used it on work laptops at three different companies.
It is definitely more of a do-it-yourself distro than Arch for sure, but I enjoy working with it.
That never seemed acceptable to me and I ended up moving over to Arch Linux for a good 10+ years before the instability of it finally got to me and I moved to Ubuntu.
Having said all of that, I'm glad to hear that Gentoo is stable for you. I really enjoyed my time with Gentoo and I got the feeling that after he left there were mistakes made in terms of everything working reasonably.
Your description of Arch reminds me of an experience I had with linode and arch years back. Due to an internal hardware issue, they basically lost my server. When I went to recreate, I discovered that you couldn't just update the world because it would immediately result in a broken system. You instead had to reconfigure a few things before updating the world.
I no longer use Linode.
At some point the vendor has to take responsibility. That's a large part of why I like Ubuntu, they do. It works every day without me having to worry about it.
I actually appreciate that Gentoo is set up to allow me to run that command if I want to.
But I did move off of Gentoo due to constant dependency conflicts. They took forever to deal with and they were pretty well guaranteed to happen whenever you didn't hold to a strict and frequent update schedule.
Well, no. The point of a rolling release system is that you upgrade by little increments, so you never have a moment when a 'major upgrade' happens and breaks your system or forces a reinstall.
Maybe don't pacman -Syu before work or if you're working the next day? It's not strictly necessary to update every day.
And no one said Arch never breaks, I just provided anecdotal counterevidence that it's really not that bad.
Why be condescending? The above user has a good point, and your view is clearly against the majority of Arch Linux users.
As I understand it, Arch Linux is like having a pet. It requires constant care and feeding to keep it alive but can be very rewarding (allegedly)
And the reason for this is because you realize the latest update killed virtualbox and you require it for your work so you need to be able to downgrade and pin the vbox application to a specific version.
Meanwhile, Ubuntu catches the problem and refuses to update the package until it's fixed. Therefore I never even realize there was a breaking update to vbox somewhere.
The difference being that Arch tells me when to tinker because it blew up again, Ubuntu allows me to choose when to tinker because it doesn't.
In my experience it happens very rarely and is often quite easily resolved.
>happens very rarely
>is often quite
I just gave a link from their FAQ that clearly states the system will break when packages break and they aren't responsible for it. As another user pointed out, you can go do a search for 'manual intervention' and find years of results on their front page.
Arch Linux users are ok with having their system randomly stop working. I used to be ok with it, until the umpteenth day that I lost half my working day getting the system back up and running.
> It is the user who is ultimately responsible for the stability of their own rolling release system. The user decides when to upgrade, and merges necessary changes when required. If the user reaches out to the community for help, it is often provided in a timely manner. The difference between Arch and other distributions in this regard is that Arch is truly a 'do-it-yourself' distribution; __complaints of breakage are misguided and unproductive, since upstream changes are not the responsibility of Arch devs__.
Even their wiki is very clear to inform you that you're at the whims of the package upgrades.
But I also want to point out that "it hasn't broke in a year" is cute, but I ran arch for probably 10+ years until I finally got tired of it and moved to Ubuntu. The last straw was me sitting down to get paying work done and spending half my day trying to recover my work environment. In the 2-3 years since I moved to Ubuntu I've never once sat down at my PC and had something stop working that was working before.
This defense of your favorite distro is especially silly when you think about it logically. Of course a rolling release system is going to have more breakages. The sensible response isn't "it never breaks!", but is instead "that's the nature of rolling release, you opt into it when you choose Arch".