Hello everyone!
I like EOS and use it daily. I plan to start some work, when my PC shall work 24/7 doing some Internet activity (advertising).
My question is as follows: What about EOS round o’clock long term use reliability? How often do you experience EOS issues and troubles, requiring stopping of any work and system repairing? Yes, I know Debian is good for such kind of use, but what about EOS? Can we rely on it?
Some people have great experiences, others not so great. Like anything else in life. In general, EOS is very solid. That being said, sometimes problems will happen. It’s very hard to give an answer that will settle your question.
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In my experience, the less moving parts, the less probability to run into issues. So Keep It KISS.
However that probability is never zero.
A bad update, a regression and the like can happen.
Also you would need to update and maintain your system periodically. Many times it will require a reboot. So it depends also on your tolerance for such “downtimes”.
The longer you let pass between such updates may increase the probability of running into some issues which will require extra attention.
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agree with all above: do your part. update, maintenance, etc.
And it will rock all day long. And all night long, too, like Joe Walsh sang.
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EOS is a rolling release, some things may break temporarily, ensure you have the knowledge and capability to be able to either work around them, or follow instructions provided to resolve them. Having said that, - have run EOS with KDE Plasma for a long while, and it hasn’t broken catastrophically (probably because I’ve stopped trying to break it 
) YMMV.
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As said previously, problems with some bad updates can happen but as long as you do proper maintenance there should be no issue.
I have been using EOS for about 10 months now on a pc that’s almost on 24/7 with different DE and the rare problems i had were only caused by my own stupidity/laziness in reading docs/install instructions, they were also solved quite easily. Not a single one was caused by EOS in itself.
You will need to reboot yourself too, and if so you will maintain OS well 
If i need the OS to run without downsides i would also recommend to not update in that time and do not tinker with the system to much too. Set things up to your needs, and create a known to work backup and may even snapshot scenario.
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An explanation of what sort of function your PC will be serving, would be beneficial.
There’s also a difference between an OS designed to be stable and reliable (FreeBSD, Debian), and an OS that has a good chance of being stable and reliable (Arch, EndeavourOS and likely many other flavours).
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For now my PC is working as a media server 24/7. Only downtime is when I update the system, usually once per week or every other week.
I’ve had issues when my EFI or root partitions got filled up with Plex metadata, flatpak data or just some other fluff, usually related to old packages. Reboot would break the system due to no free space.
I think this could happen to other distros too, not just an Arch or EOS issue. Always make sure you have enough free space on your EFI and root partitions and also try to set your system up so it will clear useless data from those partitions regularly.
My workstation runs 24/7 year round without issue. It only goes down when I reboot it.
That being said, what are you planning on running on it. If you are planning on running some kind of server, it is better to run it in a container. That way you won’t be caught with conflicts as EOS rolls to the latest library.
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EndeavourOS is very stable I even do some ocational minor tinkering. 
I have used it for over 1.5 year now and only minor issues with easy quick fixes.
As written in another thread I am running EOS as a “server” since approx. 6 years. It serves as dns-/dhcp-, ldap-, samba-, nfs-, imap-/sieve-/postfix-/fetchmail-, mariadb-, web(apache)- and dlna-server.
My main suggestion is to update only once a week and to check upcomming updates for major changes before running the update to be prepared for necessary work to be done.
Looking back I have had only a few times really severe problems with updates during those approx. 6 years.
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What are you using now ?
Of course my PC crashed sometime during yesterday, between 8 and 9 pm. I believe this is the first crash I’ve had since switching to air cooling some months ago.
Still EndeavourOS of course!
NP other Distro can beat EOS.
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I have been running it on my daily driver for few years without a hiccup, I only nuked my install once because I wanted to rearrange my hard drives and partitions. I recently did have to reinstall, and I thought I had fixed it, long story short it was a specific program causing the issue, but I didn’t lose any of my data as my /home partition is separate. A few configs were messed up during the reinstall, was a quick fix, nothing major. As far as 24/7 usage, I think the longest I’ve run was 6-7 months across one summer. Our power goes out a LOT here due to storms/trees falling on power lines. It’s never crashed and needed a full restart, and better, nothing bad seems to have ever happened to it despite the power outages. So far only one update caused an issue, and it was a single package that I linked to above.
You can skip the blogpost below, it just a summary of my journey that landed me here. EOS is great and I’ve been running it for a few years. I was one of the original WinXP holdouts lol before I got stuck being a Win7 holdout, and then after Win10 decided to be spyware I officially jumped to linux around 2018.
I run steam games, video transcodes, and occasionally mine crypto as a hobby for fun. Every now and then a program will crash, but its completely unrelated to EOS. I run a first gen Ryzen cpu and it has segmentation faults from time to time that crashes whatever program the fault happens to. Running at a slower RAM speed keeps the issue at bay, I’m lucky if something crashes once a month. At Higher RAM speeds, about 2 minutes lol. 
I also run it as a reverse proxy server on another pc. I ran Kubuntu, Fedora, Mint, and a few others as daily drivers/servers, being rather afraid to try an Arch distro like Endeavour. You’re encouraged to use distros like those because they hold packages back to be tested before being release, which seems like a good idea, but I consistently had nothing but problems. After system hangs and buggy outdated held back packages/backports on other distros (for security’s sake) and having to go to the Arch wiki for help trying to diagnose something, I thought why not give Arch a try, at least they write info pages to help others that are very well written. If they’re that well written, maybe they’re tidy and thorough elsewhere despite it being rolling release and bleeding edge. So I tried Manjaro, which to be fair wasn’t bad, but I did have issues and it did crash from time to time on more than one pc. But, Manjaro holds their packages back a cycle “to be on the safe side,” much like Ubuntu, but it seemed to cause more problems than it was worth for me, just like Ubuntu did
Sadly, the worst part was the community. I’m not trying to bash or cause a stink here, I’m mentioning it because getting help is a necessity to new users. If you want reliability, you need a good forum with good people. There is a quite a few good people on the Manjaro forums, and they want to help, but there are a few who are incredibly toxic and will go as far as deleting your posts even if its a real problem you’re dealing with. It’s just that when you go somewhere for help, you expect a certain “air” of, well, help, not someone throwing your post in the trash and then telling you that you/yourself/your hardware/etc are the problem. I’m not bashing Manjaro, there were many people who did in fact help me there and they were very nice. But, I decided to move on anyway as the few bad apples had left a bad taste in my mouth. Other distro’s forums were much less toxic. To repeat, I mention this because it a BIG help to average users who just want their pc to work, and the less toxic a community/forum is, the quicker more people are onboard. It’s a good thing. The faster an issue is mentioned and worked on, the faster it can be fixed, Everybody’s happy.
This adds to the 24/7 reliability question, if something pops up, the forum can help. When someone else has the same problem, they can find your solution very quickly here. This is something that is lacking in modern social chat areas like Discord, as they are less “concrete” or searchable.
So me liking Arch slightly more due to not hiding behind “making it easier for the end user by making it somehow less usable” that happens with other distros and the previously mentioned ever so slightly toxic community made me jump to distros again. I decided to stay Arch-ish. Something about Arch giving you the wiki/manuals you need is like teaching a man to fish instead of handing him a fish, or giving them a repair manual when something is wrong with their car instead of fixing it for them. In the long run, its better for the individual and the community.
I switched to Endeavour to be more bleeding edge after backing up my necessities and had read the Arch wiki quite bit. Since the switch, Ive never looked back.
Been smooth sailing despite the claims that bleeding edge distros are dangerous and I’ve had basically zero problems otherwise. It’s nice when things just work, and if you need help, its just a click a away. Better yet, you’re encouraged to be here if you need help. 
I just remembered after typing out this blogpost… I do have a Dell Latitude laptop that once in a blue moon will completely freeze with the caps lock key blinking. It’s rare enough that I’ve never bothered to look up whats causing it and it never happens while using it. I believe it has to do with the laptop going to sleep while on a battery. Happened probably twice in 3 years lol
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Thank you so much!
Little late to the party, but allow me to weigh in on that.
Running 24/7 shouldn’t be an issue for any Linux system. I would say the bottleneck here are the hardware and your electricity bill. However, I would take some time out of these 24/7 to do regular updates. Especially when your machine is online 24/7 and probably running some exposed services. If you want to be professional: Check all of the changes the updates introduce before you update. At least read the change-logs / release notes and/or have a test system and apply updates there, before you apply them to your production system, of which you have redundancy.
None of this has to do with EOS. It’s just good practice I’ve learned on the job. This is what will give you reliability.
And a word on Debian, if you allow. Debian was started in 1993, 2 years after the inception of Linux. Back then the community was almost exclusively made up of hobbyists and tinkerers. Debian has deservedly acquired its reputation as a stable distribution in those “Wild West” days and probably the first decade of its existence. However, since the beginning of this century, there have been a lot of developments in the Linux world. A lot of stuff was professionalized. Yes, we still have the hobbyists and tinkerers and they are no doubt THE vital part of Linux. But there are a lot of people who take it more seriously, who want to build a career or business based on Linux. And therefore Linux has become much more predictable and stable as a whole. In light of all of this, I don’t think the much-invoked stability of Debian and its derivatives is such a strong feature anymore. In my personal experience often quite the contrary: bugs that persist for years after the developers fixed them, outdated software with missing features, the refusal to publish an update for a severe bug for three days because of “cool-down”. I don’t know. Not the kind of stability I want or need.
I can’t tell anyone what to use and I surely don’t even want to. Someone likes Debian? Great, use Debian. But as for me I’m glad I finally left that behind and hopefully for good.
Well, anything can break and in general that’s more or less likely on rolling-release than Debian. It’s good that you have found EOS, but I don’t in general like bashing other distro’s simply because one finds them as not their piece of cake. There’s place for all distros and Debian and Debian-based have legitmely found their place as solid choices for server and other usage which requires stability over bleeding-edge.
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And how come this contradicts on the need of stability? Bleeding-edge is what it is; literally bleeding, that can sometimes cause issues that require in these cases valuable work time to get running again.
Also the fact that hobbyists and volunteers develop something doesn’t mean that they don’t take their work seriously.