The whole point of a bleeding-edge and rolling-release distro is that you get the lastest packages available. If you wait longer for the buggy updates to get fixed, then it doesn’t make it any different from Mint and other stable distros. It might even be worse because even if you wait, every update would still include a package that may be buggy because of the nature of rolling releases.

If you update once or twice a week, chances are there are literally hundreds of packages to upgrade every time. There’s no chance someone will look into every single one of these packages to verify what could potentially ‘break’ their system or not. They just upgrade the whole thing and THEN, if something breaks, they work around it.

As someone who uses CachyOS daily as my main distro, I wouldn’t install it on a device for someone that doesn’t want to do some maintenance from time to time. Maybe I wouldn’t go as far to say that it is UNSTABLE, but point release distros such as Mint or Debian are definitely more stable and require much less maintenance. Rolling release distros are, naturally, much riskier.

this is total bullshit. you need to update for security reasons. and every time you update, you get the latest version with allpossible incompatibilities. even if you are updating only a few times per month, you don’t update to a “known working state”, you update to the latest package version with all problems that might come with it.

also long times between updates can cause various other problems.

If you upgrade often, you’re more likely to run into buggy releases. Just upgrade less often and reduce your likelihood of installing buggy latest releases. Just like Debian and other such distros do. You’re in charge on Arch.

While it’s true you can do that, then why choose Arch in the first place? One of the key elements in the philosophy for Arch is: Modernity, i.e. to always have the latest version to be the stable version, aka the rolling release model. You can choose not to upgrade, but it can be a immense footgun. There’s a reason it’s harder to upgrade between release versions in distros like Debian.

Besides being a stable release doesn’t guarantee no bugs either, only that they don’t change. Meaning as long as the bugs are minor or can be bypassed, it’s still considered stable.

This is only one way of mitigating risk that you can do, but I do concede that Arch does not take every precaution that other distros do to ensure that broken packages are not released. They do however follow up with news posts if there’s an issue, with info about what to do. This is an awesome thing.

No doubt, but you do have to keep track of this. People non familiar with it may find their systems temporarily borked if they don’t. One good mention for those of interest is their incredible documentation, it can also be used as a reference for other distros too.

But still, I haven’t had an issue in over a decade, upgrading packages probably once a week or so.

There’s no “maintenance” other than what you create for yourself. This Arch = “maintenance” (whatever that entails in everyone’s mind) nonsense has got to be put to bed.

In over a decade using Arch, I have encountered bugs or changes when upgrading packages, following a similar upgrade cadence. I also used packages that have been deprecated from the official repository, and then maintaned by users in the AUR. These are things that break the users experience and require maintenance. Regardless if it’s a bug or not, or if it happens once or twice a year, the user has to pay close attention.