Unlike Debian, Arch Linux has what they call a "rolling release schedule," which means that the only choices you have are (1) refrain from using Pacman at all to update your software, which of course leaves security vulnerabilities unpatched and (2) opening yourself up to major changes to major subsystems, like Gnome, any time you use pacman to update your system.

In contrast, on Debian, major changes to e.g. Gnome are mostly limited to when a new version of Debian comes out, and you get a lot of leeway as to when to upgrade to the new version, and in particular, sometimes you have the option of subscribing to just the security patches for your version of Debian -- an option that Arch Linux just does not offer at all.

And I got the impression that updates of Arch Linux broke things that required my manual intervention to fix more than updates of Debian did.

Still it is a very compelling distribution because of its "elegance".

I probably spend just as much time maintaining my OS X box as I did maintaining my Arch Linux box: e.g., when I upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard and from Snow Leopard to Lion, I had to install a bunch of stuff (a dict client, Gnu coreutils, Carbon Emacs, even wget IIRC) to get a comfortable environment, and the installation took a lot more time than it would have on a Linux distro. E.g., the upgrade to OS X 10.7.3 changed the behavior of sleep mode such that simply bumping the mouse wakes the system, which eliminates most of the value I used to get from putting the system to sleep, so now I have to ask on some forum for a way to revert to the OS X 10.7.2 behavior of waking only on key press or mouse button click.

> And I got the impression that updates of Arch broke things that required my manual intervention to fix more than updates of Debian did.

Maybe it looks more 'frequent' but when it does so it's in a much, much more limited scope each time. It's more like small, discrete steps vs a whole batch at once.

> you have the option of subscribing to just the security patches for your version of Debian -- an option that Arch Linux just does not offer at all.

That's because Arch subscribes to the opinion that upstream knows best, and puts emphasis on as much vanilla as possible (which contributes to its overall simplicity, leanness and elegance). Hence security update means version bump from upstream. Contrast with Debian which actively back ports security patches to the pinned version in each release.

> E.g., the upgrade to OS X 10.7.3 changed the behavior of sleep mode such that simply bumping the mouse wakes the system, which eliminates most of the value I used to get from putting the system to sleep, so now I have to ask on some forum for a way to revert to the OS X 10.7.2 behavior of waking only on key press or mouse button click.

Ironically (although I did not notice that particular behavior myself) this would restore the pre-Lion behavior.

I've been using Arch for about five years, and I can tell you that things break more frequently than with any other distro I've used for a suffiently long amount of time. Things break more frequently when you're tinkering with things, but sometimes even on routine updates. If you want something more stable, use Debian Testing or Slackware. That being said, Arch is great. Try it!

> things break more frequently

Yes it might be more frequent, yet each time it is of a more limited scope since it concerns a single, maybe two packages. Following the news and maybe the forums helps a lot. Example regarding the scope: I upgraded some machines Ubuntu 11.04 to 11.10, and so much breakage occurred that the machines required such an extend of work that they simply were declared unrecoverable and reinstalled from scratch.

> use Debian Testing

In the months following a release, Debian testing essentially == Sid, and breakage is infamous.

Yes, following the news is incredibly useful for preventing breakage on updates, and the forums are especially useful for repairing breakage since other people will often have had the same issue on a big update. Probably half the time something "breaks" on a `pacman -Syu' for me, it's just a quick fix that was the result of me neglecting to read the front page news.

Rolling-release distros and low-maintenance updates are pretty orthogonal concepts. That said, once you get it set up, it's only the major, breaking changes that require real work to maintain, and these are posted regularly on archlinux.com.

I update once a week, keep configs up to date with "yaourt -C" (yaourt is available in the AUR), and read archlinux.com prior to updates to avoid issues.

One caveat is that you need your /boot mounted if you keep it separate, or else anything that depends on linux-headers (like filesystem drivers :/) will break if there's a kernel update.

If you want stability along with the tweakability, go with Debian.

For me it is (unrealistic). Every update is fear that something will break. Vim, kmail, even gtk themes. You don't know the day or the hour.

At least that's how it is for me. I know many people who have no problems with updates breaking stuff in Arch; maybe it's the fact that I'm using a full-blown KDE instead of a mere xmonad or such. But I wouldn't recommend Arch to anyone who expects stuff to work.

IMO, minimalism is as much a defensive strategy as it is an aesthetic for Arch users.

Now that I have arch working for my needs, I spend hardly any time maintaining it.

The only issues come up when some sort of breaking change is released, and in that case there is always an article right on the arch homepage for steps to migrate to the new package.

and I suppose if your needs are limited cause you only need common services (emacs, firefox, tmux) those incidents will be pretty unusual?

Very unusual. The one time I had a fair amount of issues to resolve was when Arch switched to python 3 as the default, instead of 2. Fortunately, this is not something they do lightly or frequently.

I had the same concerns, but after a solid year on Arch only, I can say that things rarely break and if they do I learn something in the process.

Yes, sometimes, like every few months or so, there is some maintenance to do, but only after manually initiating system updates. Never once have I come across a maintenance issue that didn't have a quick solution already discussed on the Arch forums or wiki.

I find that almost every time something breaks it's really because I haven't been careful enough. What you need to do is watch out for any messages during updating (especially during kernel updates) and make sure to just use sudo carefully etc.

I also want to add that while people always seem to talk about Arch breaking, it has hardly broken more for me that Windows of Ubuntu have in the same period of time. The advantage is that when Arch breaks, you fix it because you just tend to really learn how your system works when you use Arch, while in Windows and Ubuntu, I'd just reinstall usually.

I use Arch as my only OS, for day-to-day use, and it's perfectly stable when I'm not actively experimenting etc.

I've been using Arch to 'get shit done' for about two years now. Apart from the occasional package upgrade to update everything to its latest versions, you don't have to do anything you don't want to.

In my own experience with Arch, things offered through AUR (while convenient) seem to cause more problems than that which is in core, extra, community, multilib, etc... In other words, things which pacman handles.

So using AUR introduces a bit of maintenance overhead in the sense that I spend more time reading the comments, checking the number of votes for an item, researching the dependencies that arise, etc. But I'm also happy AUR is there to supplement what is in the supported repos. That said, I've definitely had some MAJOR problems that I've had to work through using AUR packages.

I would say that your statement about putting in the time up front to learn how the system works in order to do relatively less system administration in the long run applies more to Gentoo than to Arch. I was a Gentoo user for several years before switching to Arch, and once you get all your configuration files set up on Gentoo, the system is rock solid. The only drawback is that you're compiling nearly everything from source based on your specific system configuration through make.conf and such, updates can take a while. However, the internal consistency and dependency resolution of emerge seems far, far better than pacman in my experience.

To me at this point Arch is as stable as OSX, and possibly even more so. I go weeks without reboots and my computer never slows down. I do updates almost every day, and most of the time have no problems. And I really appreciate the rolling-release paradigm. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that possibly sometime in the future, OSX could potentially go that route as well. It already seems like they're headed there in some ways.

I have seen arch break pretty spectacularly, but only on systems where i did some, to put it delicately, unadvisable things (put /tmp, /var/tmp on tmpfs, put /usr on unionfs over squashfs, etc). Where I have avoided breaking standard practice, I have never had a single problem. I also see it to arch's credit that I was able to do such horrific things to it with such ease (and fairly good documentation).

>I also see it to arch's credit that I was able to do such horrific things to it with such ease (and fairly good documentation).

This is the key differentiator between Arch and other distros (particularly, Debian): Arch wins when the user wants to modify the system in ways not intended by the maintainers of the distro. In contrast, Debian wins against Arch when the user never does anything that the maintainers of the distro did not anticipate that users would do. (Debian wins here because changes have gone through vastly more real-world testing and bug-fixing before hitting Debian stable than they have gone through before hitting the machine of the Arch user. Note that there is no stable version of Arch Linux.)

I have been using Archlinux for over 2 years. During this period I have installed it on all the machines I _own_ (3 laptops, 1 work desktop). The biggest problem I had was when I had /usr on its own partition. This behavior was not recommended and an update broke it. However this was easy to fix and took < 20 minutes to resolve.

Also, try to use pacman as much as possible.

If I never broke anything...I would not know much about Linux! I think part of maintaining a distro like Arch is dealing with things breaking. The good news is that you learn about how something works and usually can figure out a solution. The Arch community is awesome and is very responsive when things don't work.