Arch is needy; it commits seppuku if you abandon it for too long. Every update on Arch is a "risky distribution upgrade", and it insists that you update every day.
On the other hand, I have kept Debian installs going for a great many years, with dist-upgrades never failing, and I know that some people have maintained the same Debian install since they first installed it in the 90s.
> zcat /var/log/pacman.log.1.gz-2018010214.backup | head
[2009-02-23 18:14] installed filesystem (2009.01-1)
You can hedge against any distro breaking by using a volume manager which allows snapshots of the root volume, or even better, creates these snapshots automatically before a distro upgrade. Both LVM and Btrfs can do this. I use LVM because I love boring tech.
It's certainly introducing more risk but these days I only update my Arch systems a maximum of once every 6 months (usually less than that) and never have an issue. This meme largely came about from ~10 years ago with the filesystem changes and migration to systemd. But it's been a pretty smooth ride since.
> Every update on Arch is a "risky distribution upgrade",
In theory it is a possibility but in practice that's not really the case. I mean you're not going to get breaking changes every week ;) Arch's package manager has really improved in recent years too so a lot of occasions that might have needed manual intervention can be handled automatically by the package manager (which wasn't the case back when this meme was true).
Also there is a news section on Arch's website so if you're genuinely nervous about running `pacman` you can check there first (this is the recommended best practice but most people don't bother these days because it's rare to have an issue).
> and it insists that you update every day.
Only if you kick off your package manager everyday. But this is true for any Linux distro since they're all pushing updated packages everyday so I don't really see how Arch differs in that regard.
> On the other hand, I have kept Debian installs going for a great many years, with dist-upgrades never failing, and I know that some people have maintained the same Debian install since they first installed it in the 90s.
I've had a Debian dist-upgrade fail before but that's just once out of a dozen(?) of successful dist-upgrades so I do agree Debian is solid. Never had an issue with upgrading CentOS either. Nor FreeBSD.
The only thing Arch does better than the above is you don't have an hour(s) of downtime during the upgrade. But as you said, that's paired with the risk that you might run into a breaking change at any point in the future. For that reason alone I wouldn't run Arch on servers (or at least not professionally -- thrown Arch on some personal servers in the past)
It's not a meme. Just this week I attempted to update an Arch system that had been left unattended for only a couple years. It got caught in some kind of cycle where it didn't have the GPG keys required to download the latest GPG keys. Then there was some package conflict issue. Finally after much wailing and gnashing of teeth I completed the update and rebooted... "kernel not found".
I gave up on it.
And lest I be accused of incompetence, here's another Arch user's 3-year update story, only a few weeks ago, on our very own HN:
"Somehow the upgrade didn't completely hose everything. It just took a bit of finagling in the form of looking through any packages that gave errors (errors like cyclic dependency stuff and conflicts from bad use of pip) and uninstalling those that I didn't see a need for or switching them to the package manager instead of pip. About an hour of babysitting it and I had a completely updated and working Arch setup." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29872053
So I'm sorry, but "pretty smooth ride" my ass.
Yeah, if you're not going to update Arch in 3 years then I'd expect some issues but in fairness to Arch, the duration you're talking about here is literally the entire support life for some distros. So I certainly wouldn't call Arch "needy" for that. I mean there does need to be a cut off point somewhere and the fact that it's still possible to recover from that state at all -- even if it isn't a smooth ride -- is pretty fscking impressive in my opinion.
So yeah, I agree that if you're the kind of person to install an OS and then not touch it again for three(!!!) years and expect it to still update then a bleeding edge rolling release distro isn't going to be your best choice. But nobody was suggesting that Arch (or any distro for that matter) is perfectly suited for every edge case out there. And while I'm sorry you've been burnt in the past, I do think the way you've presented your arguments here is rather disingenuous.
Instead, you run into "Firefox not supported" issues.
Ironically I switched away from Windows and onto Linux precisely because I was sick of things not working on Windows. Sure, it has the best desktop application support of any operating system but to use it for anything more than just a desktop machine requires hours of configuration because everything is tailored to supporting technologically illeterate people (eg file extensions being hidden). Very little of any of this config can be automated -- or at least not in any easy way. And then Microsoft will pull some bullshit move that undoes half your config and you need to start all over again (much like the author of this submission has experienced). Or every few years you need to upgrade to a new release of Windows and you have to find where to change all those settings again plus learn a stack of new settings you need to change too.
Eventually I realised I was spending as much time maintaining the OS as I was actually writing software on it. So I stopped using Windows. Or rather decided to keep Windows around for emergencies but use Linux as my primary desktop (instead of keeping Linux around for emergencies and using Windows as my primary desktop).
My experience with Linux has been that you have the same install running for 10+ years (this is especially true for Arch because you have fewer risky distribution upgrades), but you can keep your config in Git so it's sync'ed across multiple machines or kept safe if you do need to reinstall your OS. Everything is automated and just works. Plus these days more and more software is browser based so you don't run into nearly as many "Linux not supported" issues as you did when I first gave up on Windows (back when XP was new).
I'm not saying your experiences are wrong but just offering the counterpoint that "thing that work" might differ for different people.