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My experience with Arch
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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The reason people say that Arch is unstable is that you are expected to read the news on the website before every update or else your system is liable to be broken -- and sometimes it will break in spite of that. Oh, and the expectation is that you'll be updating multiple times per week, and if you don't, you will soon be in a situation where to install any package you must update your entire system.
Most other distros place no such expectations on the user.
One time I did not update an arch system for something like 6 months... You can't immagine the troubles I needed to go through to get it into a working state.
I have had multiple systems with no updates for a year.
The biggest pain is always that the keyring is out of date and it does not want to install packages signed with newer keys. Once you have dealt with that once or twice, it is quick and easy to resolve and the rest of the update generally just works.
Yes, the keyring is a pain, also because I like to manually check all the keys. But then what often happens is that lots of configuration options have changed and you have to go through bunch of software to find out which exact package is now misconfigured and makes your system not work as it should.