this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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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.
I would also add that it heavily depends on the setup a user is running. I had been running Arch with XFCE and dwm for years on a machine with a Nvidia card and I can count the number of issues I had which were not induced by my wrong-doing with three fingers. When I switched to Plasma Wayland on my new machine I faced more issues in one and a half years than with my old setup. Also, none of these issues were mentioned on the news section but were due to Plasma updates. There are just too many moving parts under heavy development with such a big DE and Wayland is also not quite 100% there yet, so for some people it can seem like Arch is rather unstable although it still is a heavy generalisation.
I’ve been using Arch for over 15 years, and honestly, I never check the news before updating. Once in a while, I’ll get an error — maybe once a year — and the fix is always just running a quick command I find on the Arch site or the package page. Takes seconds, no drama.
I’ve only managed to break my system twice, and both times were 100% my fault. Even then, recovery was easy: just chroot in and run one command.
As for updates, doing them regularly (daily, weekly, or monthly) is recommended. No need to go crazy with updates. Too frequent updates are actually discouraged. Arch is a rolling release, so your packages and dependencies get updated together — meaning things don’t randomly break. Skipping updates won’t nuke your system either, and if something ever goes sideways, you can just downgrade and be back up in no time.
This has been my exact experience as well. I run updates whenever I log into the machine. Sometimes daily other times monthly depending on the computer, and very rarely have I run into errors.
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.
Interesting. I once didn’t update the arch system on my laptop for several years, while it was sitting in a drawer. Had to manually update the keychain but besides that the update just worked
To be fair, you don't need to update your system to install a package, all you need to do is run the update command just to sync up the database, then cancel out when prompted.
I've gone multiple weeks/months without updating and everything was fine.
That's called a partial update and is strongly discouraged by the Arch Linux documentation.