 Arch Linux has a really bad reputation when it comes to stability. I don't think it's earned at all. Now I ran a poll on my community tab a couple days ago and asked people who have used Arch how many times they've had a showstopping issue with Arch Linux and the vast majority of people have never had a situation where Arch Linux has broken the computer and those that have had that have had it only once or twice. Now, obviously this is the most scientific poll in the history of polls, so we should take it as gospel. But the point is that I think that that little sample is a good representation of Arch as a whole. I think the vast majority of people who use Arch Linux experience it being just as stable as any other Linux distribution. And by that I mean they experience the same problems as you would if you installed Ubuntu or Debian or whatever. Sometimes shit happens, you know? Just because you're on Debian doesn't mean things never go wrong. That's blatantly untrue. There's a difference between high maintenance which is what I would categorize Arch Linux as and unstable which I would not categorize Arch Linux as. Arch takes much more maintenance than Debian does. If you install a Debian or a Debian-based distro you can install that on your computer and just leave it there forever. And chances are in two or three years if you wanted to go through and update it you'd be perfectly fine updating that to the latest LTS or whatever. If you're on Arch and you set it on your computer and forget it for a while, updating that is a lot harder and you're much more likely to face problems. Now, the point is I don't think Arch is as unstable as people make it out to be. Now, would you want Arch Linux on a server? I don't think so. But it has nothing to do with the stability of Arch Linux. It has to do with the amount of maintenance that Arch Linux requires in order to stay stable. And because you're doing more updates you're more likely to find packages or whatever that flake out every once in a while. That's where Arch Linux really gets its reputation from because when you do an update every once in a while you'll come across something that causes some kind of problem. Most of the time these are not show stopping bugs. Most of the time the solution is right on archlinux.org. And I've been using Arch Linux now mostly full time. I mean, I've switched away. I've been lured away from Arch a couple of times to use something different for whatever reason. But during my time using Arch I've never seen, not a single time have I ever had an update bork my system, not one time. Now, I have had Arch installs that have broken either due to me installing some kind of broken package from the AUR or me deleting something that I shouldn't have done. Those are user errors. Those have nothing to do with Arch Linux. I could have easily made those same mistakes on Ubuntu. So I don't think that you'd want Arch Linux on a server, but on a desktop system I believe and I argue that Arch is just as stable as Ubuntu is or can be. The point here isn't stability at all. The argument against Arch Linux and for Ubuntu or for Arch Linux and against Ubuntu isn't whether or not these two systems are stable because they're just as stable as each other. The argument for or against them all has to do with the amount of effort it takes to maintain them and to maintain that stability. With Arch, you have to do much more maintenance. With a Debian-based or Ubuntu-based distro you have to do much less maintenance. That's the key point. I think that that's the distinction that a lot of people either don't understand or get confused about because like I said, there's this sense in the Linux community that Arch is this horrible, unstable thing that if you're using a rolling release distro, your computer is always on the edge of being completely broken. And that is so far from the truth. Now, I talked about maintenance, high maintenance versus instability. And there's not a right or wrong way to go here. At least when it comes to using Linux on your desktop, on your regular computer, what you like is what you like. And that's the way it should be. Now, if you're, like we talked about servers, if you're on a server, you're much more interested in the least maintenance possible. And that's going to be something based on Debian or Red Hat or something like that. Something that gets updated on a set release schedule that doesn't break if you skip an update. So I mean, the server area is much different than the desktop Linux environment. So problem I've had with people in the Linux community is that they have this sense that Arch Linux is this horrendously unstable thing. And I keep just arguing like, no, it's not. Like, no, it's not. If you ask any Arch Linux user, yes, you're going to find some people who have tried Arch Linux and have had a bad experience installing it. This isn't about installing Arch Linux because the install of Arch Linux can be not great. Even if you get it installed afterwards, a lot of times people get Arch Linux installed. They go through the system, they go through the process of installing it, go through the text installer, and they feel very accomplished and they got Arch Linux installed and they post their Neo Fetch on Unix porn. Like, ooh, I got Arch Linux installed. But then they realize that they're missing packages because Arch Linux is very much a build your own distro. You have to go through and you have to install things that are taken for granted on other systems that aren't build your own. And I've come up to come across that in my own experiences with Arch Linux is that even if you have Arch installed, a lot of the times, even after that, Arch can feel broken because it doesn't have all the packages that you need out of the box. You have to go through and install things like them. You have to go through and install things like Network Manager and all this stuff. I mean, every single piece is something that you have to install. So when I'm talking about instability, I'm not talking about people who experience problems with the install. I'm talking about you've been using Arch Linux for three, four months, three, four years. Which has your experience been? And I would say if you ask the majority of people who are in that situation, you'll probably find that the vast majority of them have either never come across instability on their system or have only done so once or twice. Now, I can only think of one time in my last couple of years of using Arch Linux or an Arch-based distro where a package has actually caused problems. And it was, like I said before, it wasn't a showstopping bug or anything. It was just like the clipboard stop working or something. I don't even remember what it was. And it was fixed the exact same day. Like they pushed out the fix to the repositories, but you could also go to archlinux.org and it told you how to fix it. So this long, rambly bit of video is just mostly about me asking, why does Arch have such a poor reputation when it comes to stability? Because it just does not seem unstable to me at all. And I think that the vast majority of people have actually used Arch longer than a couple of days. Probably agree with me. In the comments below, I'd love to hear your experiences with Arch Linux. If you've never used it before or if you've only used it for a little while and you've had problems or if you've been using it forever, I'd love to hear it. So leave those comments below. If you wanna follow me on Twitter, you can do so at Linuxcast. You can also support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast. Before I go, I'd like to take a moment to thank our current patrons. Devon, Marcus, Meglin, Donnie, Sven, Merrick, Camden, Mitchell. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.