I have always been afraid to install Arch because they tell you it is difficult to install and unstable. I want a simple system following the KISS philosophy and install only what I need, which is little. I don’t need anything from the aur repository, for now. Just a year ago I installed Arch and there it is, no problems and doing every day pacman -Syu. It has been a real discovery for me, it’s the only distribution I’ve had this last year that hasn’t crashed. I didn’t expect it, but Arch has made me change my opinion and pay less attention to the opinions of “youtubers” and more to my own experience. In your experience of use, has Arch been stable in its operation?
I think the thing with Arch is that it’s very customizable, so it’s essentially as complicated as you make it. If you just install the base and Firefox and Libreoffice, and never mess with the AUR or touch anything else, then you’ll most likely never have much trouble. If you’re like me and you turn it into an unholy mishmash of base packages, AUR, flatpaks, Appimages, Docker containers, VMs and lashed-together Wine things, you’ll have a huge teetering pile of spinning plates that requires constant fiddling lol. But that is very much by design.
You’ve described my systems to a T and I don’t like it lol
Same, heard all the rumblings on how hard to install Arch was, followed the guide one day and installed it without any issues, it was easy for a technical user ( probably hard for somebody coming from Windows GUI only).
A few things went wonky after an update, and I used the system daily for work; so went back to OpenSUSE where it was always stable, and built in snapahotting just in case.
If anyone tries OpenSUSE you can make it as minimal as you like during install. The summary menu prior to commiting to install has a software heading, click it and it brings you to patterns to chec/uncheck, from their you can click details and go to a full list of packages, deselect al, then click only the packages you want.
I have had the same Arch install for years where Ubuntu on the other hand breaks after 2-3 major version upgrades from accumulated cruft.
It is important to keep Arch updated but sometimes I go a month or two without doing it.
Occasionally they have some update that’s not backwards compatible and you have to be a bit careful about it but if it breaks someone already has the answer on the forums from earlier that week. You can also install “informant” which displays the latest arch news post before installing because they usually warn you when there’s a breaking change.
Not quite Arch, but I’ve been running EndeavourOS without any issues. It’s been super stable! The only time I’ve had issues is when I’ve messed with the system.
Been very happy running Manjaro, which is based on Arch.
