Unironically my most headache-free Linux experience in 10+ years. The handful of times an update doesn’t go through you just need to visit the homepage and follow the manual intervention steps outlined in the announcement.
I know CachyOS, at least, shows recent Arch announcements during the update process before installing anything. Unfortunately there’s been a recurring DDoS attack on Arch’s servers for months, so this check tends to fail and you aren’t always notified of breaking changes.
I cannot count the number of times Debian Upgrade broke on me. My memory tells me I had issues with all upgrades (on various machines with mostly defaults) since Debian 8. It’s 13 now. I did follow the correct upgrade process and quite familiar with it, yet every single time I had issues at least for some of the desktops of my elder relatives and friends that I managed. Arch was just stable. And manual intervention is usually needed only if you have this particular thing installed. So, quite seldom. For servers, I think that was much better for me, but now I’m either Arch or Fedora (for situations where I don’t bother with setting my personal environment).
Back then it was for many simply the first rolling distro they tried… to suddenly realize that without tedious (and rarely unproblematic) release upgrades the reasons for a new install (thus trying out yet another distro) also vanished.
I have reinstalled Arch on the same machine only once, after SSD of my super old MacBook Air got corrupted. I haven’t used the laptop for like five years. Weirdly, a reinstall went well, and it looks like the SSD works well so far. Apart from that, my oldest system is about 7 years old, and it’s running well. I have no reason to reinstall. That very machine is a server. Also, I had a MacBook Pro broke keyboard on me, I simply rsynced my entire system to another MacBook Pro, and was done within about two hours. Needed to update /etc/fstab and maybe something else too. So, apart from Arch becoming a bit of a meme, I cannot recommend it more. It taught me quite a lot too. It was mostly stable for me.
Apparently, it’s dangerous to mention Arch— but I’d dare to do just that!
Unironically my most headache-free Linux experience in 10+ years. The handful of times an update doesn’t go through you just need to visit the homepage and follow the manual intervention steps outlined in the announcement.
At least, once I freed myself from Nvidia x)
I know CachyOS, at least, shows recent Arch announcements during the update process before installing anything. Unfortunately there’s been a recurring DDoS attack on Arch’s servers for months, so this check tends to fail and you aren’t always notified of breaking changes.
I cannot count the number of times Debian Upgrade broke on me. My memory tells me I had issues with all upgrades (on various machines with mostly defaults) since Debian 8. It’s 13 now. I did follow the correct upgrade process and quite familiar with it, yet every single time I had issues at least for some of the desktops of my elder relatives and friends that I managed. Arch was just stable. And manual intervention is usually needed only if you have this particular thing installed. So, quite seldom. For servers, I think that was much better for me, but now I’m either Arch or Fedora (for situations where I don’t bother with setting my personal environment).
Back then it was for many simply the first rolling distro they tried… to suddenly realize that without tedious (and rarely unproblematic) release upgrades the reasons for a new install (thus trying out yet another distro) also vanished.
I have reinstalled Arch on the same machine only once, after SSD of my super old MacBook Air got corrupted. I haven’t used the laptop for like five years. Weirdly, a reinstall went well, and it looks like the SSD works well so far. Apart from that, my oldest system is about 7 years old, and it’s running well. I have no reason to reinstall. That very machine is a server. Also, I had a MacBook Pro broke keyboard on me, I simply rsynced my entire system to another MacBook Pro, and was done within about two hours. Needed to update
/etc/fstaband maybe something else too. So, apart from Arch becoming a bit of a meme, I cannot recommend it more. It taught me quite a lot too. It was mostly stable for me.