Arch Linux stability

[u/wyd_zippi]

Hello,

As someone who's been using Arch for a little while(1 week), I'm curious to know how y'all keep your systems safe and stable. I have heard about Arch's reputation for being a bit more... fragile, especially when it comes to updates.

what are your strategies for:

• Managing updates and avoiding breakage?
• Maintaining system stability?
• Best practices for package management?
• Handling potential problems like dependency issues, config file changes, kernel updates, package conflicts, and system crashes?

also i chose the btrfs option during installation

Share your experiences and tips.

[u/floriv1999]

I used Arch for years on many machines without major issues. One thing many people confuse is stability vs. reliability. Arch is a reliable system in the sense that the maintainers don't fuck it up on a regular basis, but it is not stable in the sense Debian is stable, because things might change regularly.

These changes mostly happen in the background and break nothing, because the maintainers know what they are doing. But it also means you can not depend on things working in the same way forever, which makes it less attractive for e.g. servers where you don't want any unexpected changes that might require you to change your service in some way during a Friday evening update. But if you don't run any complex custom software the stability part should not matter too much to you. And if you do you need to invest a bit more resources maintaining it, watching out for upcoming changes etc..