Well, try not to shred too many SATA SSDs then until you get there 🤡

Here’s the thing: your answer is both invalidating and ignorant, and it shows a lack of understanding of what differentiates Arch from a stable distro.

• My wifi, that had been working fine since I installed this computer in 2020, broke in kernel 6.11 and 6.12 because Arch pushed those updates.
• Early plasma 6.0 releases were rough as balls for months, because Arch pushed those updates.
• My bluetooth, that had been working since I installed this computer in 2020, started to randomly disconnect sometime last year due to buggy firmware updates because Arch pushed those updates.
• Hell even plain old intel ethernet on my old system from 2014 suddenly started hanging up under load a year or two ago (never found the cause, did find a workaround).

None of these issues were a fault of my own, all I did was pacman -Syu, and none of this would happen on a stable distro. I’m not saying Arch is shit because of this, I’m saying: beware of what you are getting into when you choose Arch: for every single package on your system, you are effectively at the mercy of whatever “upstream” decides to shit out that week. Being delusional about that fact and having guys come crawling out of the woodworks everytime this is mentioned, saying platitudes like: “I nEvEr HaD aN iSsUe” doesn’t help anyone.

What you’ve said is true, though it’s a bit of a trade-off

Yes, and that’s why after more than 10 years I still use Arch. I like having the latest version of things and I’m confident enough in my abilities that I know that if something breaks I can always either find a fix, or at least identify the offending package, hold it back, report the bug and wait for the issue to be resolved.

There are times where it can be trying though. The first plasma 6 releases for example were rough. More recently, I’ve also been having issues with 6.11 and 6.12 kernels and my ax200 wifi that I only recently found a fix to. My wifi would freeze whenever I started streaming video from the PC to my TV, but only in kernels after 6.11. Turning off TCP segmentation offloading with ethtool resolved it (ethtool -K wlan0 tso off). You don’t want to know how long I had been pulling my hair out at that issue until I found the fix.

That’s such a cop-out answer and totally missing the point. I’ve run Arch on 4 different systems, and yes I had different issues on each and sometimes issues that hit across the board.

At the end of the day, whether or not this was just my personal experience doesn’t matter. What matters is that the issues were always caused by what Arch is: a unstable rolling release distro that pushes out the latest version of upstream packages, bugs and all. Sooner or later some will hit you, telling yourself and other people otherwise is deluding yourself and those people.

I’ve been using Arch since 2014. If I could be arsed, I could write you a looooooooong list of regressions I’ve had to deal with over the years. For an experienced Linux user, they’re usually fairly easy to deal with, but saying you never have to deal with anything is just a lie.

My experience with Arch is basically: it’s all very predictable until it isn’t and you suddenly find yourself troubleshooting something random like unexplainable bluetooth disconnects caused by a firmware or kernel update.

Luckily, this problem will disappear soon as we’re moving to systems with only nvme drives. Kinda hard to mistake /dev/nvmexny for /dev/sdx.