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.

I personally don’t use Arch, but I think the reason so many people find it stable in practice is because they know their system well. When something breaks or needs to be changed, they know which configuration file to edit, which package to {un,re,}install, what to look for in the AUR, etc., and they can usually avoid those things in the first place, because they went through a fairly hands-on install process, not to mention having the best Linux wiki in existence at their disposal.

On top of that, I think a lot of derivatives of Debian, including Ubuntu and all its derivatives, severely undermine their stability by providing custom configurations for or changes to software that are rarely documented and completely transparent to the user… until they break and leave no indication of how to fix them. Which is one reason why I ended up using base Debian.

The stability of a distro usually has more to do with API and ABI stability than stability in terms of reliability. And a “stable” system can be unreliable.

That’s why RHEL forks are said to be compatible bug for bug. Because you don’t know if fixing the bug could have a cascading side effect for somebody’s very critical system.

Arch has been nothing but reliable for me. Does it doesn’t need fixing sometimes because the config format of some daemon changed, or Python or nodejs got updated and now my project doesn’t build? Absolutely not. But for me usually newer versions are better even if it needs some fixing, and I like doing it piecemeal rather than all at once every couple years.

Stable distributions are well loved for servers because you don’t want to update 2000 servers and now you’re losing millions because your app isn’t compatible with the latest Ruby version. You need to be able to reliably install and reinstall the same distro version and the same packages at the same versions over and over. I can’t deal with needing a new server up urgently and then get stuck having to fix a bunch of stuff because I got a newer version of something.

I use multiple distros regularly, for different purposes. Although lately Docker has significantly reduced my need for stable distros and lean more on rolling distros as the host.

Arch has been the least problematic distribution for me, by far. Anything that was ever broken was a result of me breaking it, which was also subsequently fixed by me, because people documented just about everything in the wiki by now.

One of my 3 installations is currently just under 8 years old. It’s only needed manual intervention, as a result of a regular update, like 3 times total

In your experience of use, has Arch been stable in its operation?

I use Arch since 2008 on multiple laptops and desktop PCs as well as multiple servers and it is the host system for my Docker-based selfhosting environment.

I never had any real issues.

Been very happy running Manjaro, which is based on Arch.

I had so many problems and had to constantly manage other distros before Arch that it was a lot of anxiety. Everytime new release of popular linux distro I knew it was gonna break if I tried to upgrade. Almost centrainly. For fear of that I had frankstein monster distro for work using lts version full of weird ppas with a more recent kernel and some more recent software that I need because everything was always old all the time. It was horrible to maintain and keep working.

Arch is just simpler, easier and much more stable. It’s just pacman -Syu all the time, have fresh software, recent kernels for the hardware improvements which is extremely important for when you buy new laptop and overall never crashes. It’s just a matter of reading the news, sometimes change a config that got deprecated, or replace some software that got abandoned or now there’s better alternative, etc. Sometimes things get some regressions for some weeks until things are bug reported and fixed upstream and eventually reach the system, but that’s waiting some weeks or rarely months. There’s always alternative to get involved in helping fix the problems with bug reports and patches if needed, but that’s extremely rare and only if you really are desperate.

Anyway, those problems were much worse on other “stable” distros, because if there’s something seriously wrong on the system you are only lucky to get fixes after a major release which may happen only once a year.

If the system is really critical and cannot fail me during work week I delay updating to the weekend sometimes. Even if I need to it’s just a matter of evaluating the risk. You do pacman -syu and see what’s comming. If it’s just some apps updating then it’s ok to do it. If it’s core system stuff like kernel, systemd, dbus, graphics drivers, maybe I’ll avoid it.

Overall it’s simpler and easier because there’s really only 1 or 2 things to keep in mind and all the rest just falls into place.

Using archlinux for more than 15 years on personal machines and maybe 5+ years on work computers.