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?

  • @PoopBuffetEnglish
    2•5 months ago

    I’ve been running it for over 10 years now across a few different PCs and stability-wise has been a mixed bag for me.

    First PC was unsurprisingly flaky. Nvidia optimus laptop where the optimus drivers were still being figured out for linux. So I was running the testing repo to get SOME semblance of usability. Plus a whole host of other issues.

    Second PC was perfect, never had a single issue with stability the 7 or 8 years i used it. Still functions, but the graphics card was starting to struggle in games. So now it sits silent.

    Latest one was perfect for a few years, but in the last few months has been getting weird. Some graphics driver/kernel issues (known bugs, now resolved). Plus other weirdness I thought was related but isn’t. Some applications just wouldn’t launch, or launched if I started them immediately after logging in, but not if i did anything else first. The plasma 6 update messed up a lot of stuff for me too. So just yesterday I reinstalled Arch to another SSD and symlinked some stuff and that has solved most of my issues. The thing is, it’s a bleeding edge rolling release distro. Sometimes things do break for me, but most of the time it’s fixed a few days later. What happened to me recently hasn’t been an issue since the old crappy laptop, and I am running a LOT of stuff from the AUR. So to summarise my essay, generally pretty stable lol.