I’m using Arch Linux for 2 years. I subscribed to Arch’s mailing lists and I check my mails daily. I use flatpak instead of AUR.
I installed my system with archinstall and I update whenever I want. I didn’t have any issues yet and it’s the only distro that just works for me.
What about your experience? Any “breakage”?
My experience with Linux is something like 4 years of Ubuntu then 8 years of Arch. What kept me in was stability (in the sense that I don’t need to clean install every 6 months) and the wiki which allowed me to learn, a lot.
Although what I sometime don’t enjoy, is the random maintenance burden : every now and then some package you rely on may change how it works (config format, cli interface). You can fix this later by keeping an outdated version but it will eventually need a bit of work. That’s something I don’t mind on my work computer, but on my personal one … I just don’t want more work coming at me when I get home and want to play games.
I think this is what people mean with it being “unstable”. If you keep the system up to date, things will break at some point, and it’s up to you to sort that out. This is because Arch makes very different promises and tradeoffs than something like Debian. It’s a distro for those who want or need to customize or just like to tinker.
The reason I left Arch was because I carelessly installed a new major version of my WM which took me hours to get working. This made me realize that while learning how things work is fun, I want my OS to be a tool rather than a project.
(If you needed to reinstall Ubuntu every six months I guess you were already using it as if it was Arch ;D)