Super curious: Ive broken my arch frequently. And then fix it and go on with my day. Or an update causes some weird package confliction because I used pip instead of pacman for one library or whatever.

But I keep hearing from different sources that "arch being super unstable is a myth. It never happens!" Okay surely not all the time, my system is usually pretty good but:

Do you people never `pacman -Syyu` ?
How have you not broken everything?! Or do you just pretend like the AUR (the best thing ever and also the source of most of my problems) doesn't exist? What black magic are you doing to appease the arch gods?

General rule is to stay away from the aur unless you have a ci server to build the packages. Other then that when you first install fix any error you find where the system will be stable.

I don't often syyu and only have two packages installed from aur right now.

I've never had syyu break things for me. I tend to prefer keeping things as vanilla and modular as possible.

What does break for me a lot is the god-forsaken nvidia optimus prime hybrid gpu on my cursed work laptop. It "works, sorta", but I don't want anything to do with it and toggle on discrete graphics in bios as soon as I can.

I've 🐝n using Arch Linux for about 3 years and it broke only one time and I have a couple of packages installed from the AUR. The only time it broke was because the update was somehow interrupted while it was installing a new Linux kernel (https://devrant.com/rants/1926146/...).

Errors I've observed in everyday use:

- ran "pip install something" and later a package wants python-something, which fails because there's already files there. But another library you want depends on it and isn't in the repo. It's a constant struggle between pip and pacman over who gets to claim it as theirs.

- two separate apps require somelib.so instead of somelib.so.5 or whatever. To make it worse, they both expect it to be two different, incompatible versions

- a package doesnt specify a version for it's dependency and just depends on the latest version. Hasn't been updated in a year and isn't compatible with that version.

-some kmod you didn't know you had decides it doesn't like some package you didn't know you had from the last update.

- some setting got reset somehow. Which conf file was that in again?

All of these are easily resolved, but I refuse to believe it's just me. Or I just have stricter standards for what counts as "stable"

Same here, the only problems I ever had were Nvidia driver and VMWare(company policy) installed via AUR.

Once I switched to Virtual Box and turned off the Nvidia card, no more problems...

But I do keep a Windows 10 machine in Virtual Box because many of our customers do have some shitty VPN solution that only works on Windows.

@theKarlisK same. Usually it's only cancelling updates that cause any real issues. Most of the time it's a 2 minute fix but a stable OS shouldnt require two minute fixes after each update.

And then there's the time that polybar just broke for like a month. My system still worked... But no status bar.

Never had big problems with arch even though I use a lot of aur packages.
I never install python packages with pip. Always use pacman or create a virtual environment.
Once had a problem with a package, but arch linux has a newticker that informs you when an update needs manual intervention was solved in no time.

@theKarlisK yeah. That was mostly my point. Arch is almost constantly useable for me. But sometimes small things decide to just not work.

With polybar, the developer didn't specify a version for libjson and relied on a deprecated function. And it got updated. And that function was removed. It's usually just little things like this. Arch as an OS rarely ever breaks. But individual packages like acting out when updates happen.