Arch never broke for me.

Unless you seek trouble and do stuff without knowing what you are doing (like blindly copy pasting commands from internet into your terminal), it generally just works.

It’s not as good as those distros where all packages come preconfigured for you to work nicely together, so if you want to build a custom system (like, choose your DE/WM/panels/widgets etc), you have to configure all of that to intergate nicely. But you could always just install KDE and everything is pretty stable there, same as in any other KDE based distro.

AFAIK Next OS was discontinued about 30 years ago. Although some of it was used in OSX.

My Linux journey started when Ubuntu was in its single digit versions. I don’t remember the exact version I used first, but it was >15 years ago.

Of course I had a long distro hopping phase, that got finally ended by Arch. Because Arch breaks less, at least if you don’t molest it. Upgrades of versioned distros always had hickups or problems, and I grew tired of having to do a larger troubleshoot session once or twice a year. Arch has only very minor hiccups once in a while, and they’re typically always the same. 99% when the update doesn’t run through the keyring changed and you have to update it first, .9% is a bug with like a new release of the DE or something that gets fixed upstream in a couple days. And .1% is you have to look at the news because some manual intervention is required, like removing a package and going for something else or whatever. That is when you keep your system free of cruft and go with a popular DE.

Just 1.5 years ago I finally left Arch after a loong time. For something that is very new and different: fedora atomic (silverblue). Technology wise it is superior in my mind, and in my last years of using Arch I had most things in Flatpaks and containers anyways. But if you want a classical distro, Arch is definitely amongst the very well working ones.

I just switched from Nobara to NixOS on my gaming PC. I’ve had NixOS on my laptop for almost a year and decided I’m comfortable enough with it to use it full time, and it works great for gaming.

Before NixOS, I was a die-hard Arch user. The only reasons it would break were because I was trying a bunch of stuff from AUR to play around with Wayland + Nvidia when that was brand new, or when I would forget to update for a while.

It breaking was primarily due to me tinkering around and not fully undoing those changes. Now I can do that with no fear on NixOS, and it’s fabulous.

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Use what you like. In answer to your question though, my experience has been that Arch is super stable. I have had fewer problems with it than maybe any other distro before.

I update very frequently, multiple times per week. There is almost always something to update. Most of the time it is just before I wrap up. Sometimes it is while I am reading something. Often, it is just as I sit down ( if I have the time, I sometimes look into new features that have arrived ). According to Lemmy, this behaviour should lead to my system being down all the time and me getting nothing done. My system has been rock solid and productive.

Now it may sound like a lot of admin but it is a mindless one line command to update and it just works. For me, it is fast, unobtrusive, and reliable. I for sure spent more time looking for missing packages on other distros. I spent a lot of time finding ways to run newer versions on other distros. I spent a lot more time dealing with problems caused by multiples application sources on other distros. Like the reading example, I mostly update while I do other things so it is not actually taking any time.

I pretty much never see the need to use Flatpak on Arch for example. I for sure am not doing anything like PPAs. I do use the AUR heavily.

IMHO, Linux works best when everything is managed by the package manager. While I have never used Nix, Arch is the only system that has made that possible for me.

Well, I should be honest on this last point. I have added the CacheyOS repos to one system ( it is actually EndeavourOS but essentially Arch ). From those repos I run a binary pre-release of the new System76 COSMIC desktop. The same package is available in the AUR but would build from source there so the CacheyOS repo is just a convenience. Obviously this system is just recreational so I am taking more risk with the packages I am using. Still, other than the incomplete status of COSMIC, this system has also been rock solid. It is in my living room ( as opposed to office ) and so I use it quite a lot every day.

There is one thing that bugs me about Arch systems. If you do not update for a while, you will get two problems.

1 - you will likely get multiple packages which have been replaced or duplicated ( multiple sources for NodeJS as an example ) and you will be asked for each one which you want to use. The system will be fine but it is a bit annoying if there are a bunch at once.

2 - New GPG keys may have been added and you may have a chicken and egg problem where you cannot move ahead without installing the new keyring but do not have the right certs to do that. You can resolve this quickly but it sucks the first time it happens and you will be Googling. It is my number one complaint about Arch.

I have only run into the second problem above for systems that I have not updated in months but I have run into it so, again, I want to be honest. That said, I have had Arch systems that laid dormant for years which I was able bring right up to date. I had a laptop that was powered off for three years. I had to refresh the keyring and the update was gigs in size but it was completely up-to-date and solid as a rock at the end of it ( same update command that I use every day - “yay -Syu” ).

Ok, one other issue…

I use the AUR extensively including to install proprietary software like IntelliJ, Rider, Microsoft Edge, Postman, and BurpSuite. As a result, occasionally I get whacked with a massive update. I did not update my main system for two weeks and got hit with a 14 Gb update! That can be mitigated though.

Mostly I update with yay or paru which includes everything from the AUR. When hit with a big update, you can use pacman instead which updates just the stuff in the core repos ( not the AUR ). So you can put all the AUR stuff off until a better time. Nothing in the core repos is that big.

With yay, you can also select which individual packages to update. So, you can skip stuff like IDEA ( about 5 gigs on its own I think ) or something that is going to take ages to compile from source.

I prefer package management from the command-line. There is pacseek for a nice TUI. If you really want a GUI, both pamac-gtk3 and octopi are in the AUR.

While I have some pure Arch systems, I mostly use EndeavourOS these days. It is faster to install and I like the defaults, including that it installs yay by default ( providing out-of-the-box access to the AUR ). EOS used to default to Xfce. It uses KDE 6 now. The online installer gives you quite a few desktops to choose from. I do not thin that Hyprland is one of them but it can be installed easily after.

Anyway, I can only speak from my own experience but Arch does not break on me and I push it pretty hard. I keep saying I want to try something like Debian as the base with Arch in a Distrobox so I still get access to all the packages. I just have not bothered yet because Arch ( or EOS ) works so well for me.

Like I said in the post on c/archlinux, I had more problems on ‘user-friendly’ distros, than I had on Arch.

NixOS

Arch doesn’t break on its own, but Arch is Arch, which means you might get an update where a post on the news says “btw, if you have changes to X file, your system won’t boot” or something. People don’t read the news before installing updates, but that’s also fine because I also don’t read them and have been using Arch for over a decade, and my system never broke on its own (to be entirely fair, one time back in 2007 I think, my system stopped showing jpg wallpapers because one library hadn’t been updated, the fix was to update my system the next day).

Also Arch is not hard to install, it’s labor intensive, but anyone with minimal Linux knowledge should be able to do it (and probably ask themselves why they’re being forced to do that).

Finally, Arch is not “cool”, lots of cringe people have ruined it and sometimes saying you use Arch sounds similar to saying you run Kali depending on the context.

Long story short, if you’re happy with what you have keep using it, I’m fairly confident you can get hyprland and everything else working on whatever distro you’re currently using. But if you’re determined to use Arch you should be fine too.

If you know what you’re getting into, arch can be a great experience, I’d say give it a try!

My vote is universal Blue and its spins like Bluefin or Bazzite

I mean, try it. Sometimes you can’t tell if something is the os or the users till you do.

Rolling release 🤷🏻‍♂️ there might be updates which cause issues where you might need to rollback, if you can handle that it shouldn‘t be a problem.

I‘m using Arch myself since about 2 months and never happened that an update break something for me - when something broke it was my own fault.

My experience, ymmv, the most work went into configuring everything you need or want the first time. The right drivers for your graphics card, for your webcam, wifi, acpi multimedia keys, etc. Though I don’t use a gnome/kde/DE, so some of that may automagically work for you. After that though, updates don’t tend to break the things you’ve already fixed.

One time in 5 years the names of some acpi keys changed, and I had to update the script, and that wasn’t really arch’s fault. Also Google did a funny thing with their monospaced font that xft couldn’t handle, again not an arch specific thing.

And here’s a hot take for you, I only update about every 18 months. That’s usually how long it takes Discord to become binarily incompatible with installed libraries. Update the keyring first and never a problem.

Arch has a good package manager and tests updates, but it is still a DIY distro.

If you add BTRFS snapshots with snapper, or timeshift with whatever, it is more stable.

What all traditional distros lack though, most important imho, is a “factory reset” feature.

Fedora Atomic desktops have this.

rpm-ostree reset

Here is the issue tracker on more factory reset components to have a “like Android” experience. (Reset /etc, reset LUKS password, recreate a new user account)

If you want Hyprland on there, qoijjj maintaines wayblue where PRs for good defaults will for sure be accepted.