I have been using Arch from a manual “Arch Way” install for 13 months and used Endeavour for 7 months prior to that and are the only linux distros I have every used. I haven’t had a single issue when using my system or with rolling release. I feel systems breaking are wildly overblown, caused by lack of user knowledge (Or some are unlucky and an issue happened early on for them), or these ideas may have been true a very long time ago before I started linux and still repeated today.
Not specific to rolling release, but I also write a lot of notes (in a personal knowledge base via Obsidian) about so many aspects of Linux and the softwares I use on it, and various commands as well as security and privacy topics. Altogether around 254,000 words so far. Not necessary to do this but I like it as my own personal repository to refer to, but for weekly use I don’t need to refer to anything specific.
Well, i did dd my setup into oblivion just the other day, but my experience with Linux (some 25 years), be it rolling or not, is rather boringly uneventful, mostly. I had a filesystem break because of one of the first versions of a Linux video editor, and Manjaro did break for me after one year of using it, and that’s when I installed EOS.
So, nothing else serious enough to report, as far as I remember. And that’s across all distro’s I remember using: Debian, MX Linux, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Bunsen Labs, Raspberry OS, Puppy, Antix and since 3 years EOS.
Congratulations, we all need a ‘dd’ refresher occassionally I had to go into rescue mode recently when I shrunk some partitions and apparently changed UUIDs therein. Always fun ;0
Well I’m revolving around Arch Linux and spinoffs for about 15 years. I never had a system that broke by updates. Sure there’re some hickups here and there, but nothing one can not fix. Most of the time I’ve done a fresh install, because the hardware got replaced entirely or I “had” to distrohop xD
If you mean, breaking as in my system didn’t work, I don’t think that has ever happened to me across many installs and many years.
I have seen applications have brief periods of breakage usually do to either getting a new version as soon as it is released or something being incompatible with a new library.
So far (after 614 days of using EOS), I’ve only had one incident where the system wouldn’t boot. I forgot to change the SSD entry in fstab after converting from NFTS to EXT4. Unfortunately, it was set up in such a way that the system couldn’t/wouldn’t boot without it.
Personally my only gripe at the moment is with Plasma. I had a regression with desktop icons not staying in place after reboot. I can crash plasmashell rather easily by playing with widgets as well. Plasma is the only thing in my system that I find slightly unstable. I had issue with notifications a couple of months ago but now they seems to work fine. Cleaning the notification could cause plasma to crash. The rest of arch works fine. Never had any issue updating or with the rest of the OS itself. My display setup is not that common 3 monitors with different refresh rate so I expect bugs. That and the fact that I’m on a Nvidia 4090. Seems to be the lucky winner of edge cases. For me Endeavour OS is the most stable distro at the moment. Tried Cachy OS as well but I had more troubles with it. That said i’m enjoying my games as usual and my computer much more than on windows.
I’ve been running EndeavourOS since December 2023, and other than having to chroot in once after using timeshift without RTFM and realizing it would break things with the systemd setup, I’ve never had anything break. (after easily fixing it, I just installed the LTS until the regression in my wifi was fixed).
That was a valuable lesson about the differences between distros.
Been running EOS since Jan 2022 or sometime after that maybe. I have had my system legitimately break maybe twice, but the second is only because of an error that I did personally. The first was actually due to a network outage during a pacman update. It was easy to fix. Once you chroot the first time, you should write down your steps so it becomes simple the next time. I now use the linux-cachyos kernel with EOS and funnily enough, had more issues recently with the base linux kernel with the RDSEED issue preventing startup. Updates do not break your system, and if they do, then usually Arch reports this via news like with the firmware split that could potentially brick things. I am very happy with EOS and Arch in general and I see absolutely no reason why anyone would use anything else except for in the server department.
Migrated from Antergos on my main system and I’ve broken my system at least 10 times. Mostly because of my own doing, but also it has broken because of root partition filling up.
Every time I have managed to save the system. Well… if you don’t count one time when I accidentally deleted my Home partition. But, the system partition was intact.
On a laptop I did a fresh install of EOS some years ago and it has been rock solid. Probably because I’m not messing with GPU passthrough on it and I’ve learned from past mistakes.
This is a whole different question than your title.
Your title is inclusive of how many times you (I) may have had a hand in borking it, so ‘a rolling release’ would be inconsequential,
Your quotes pins it only on the update,
if this is not your experience then you are doing everything right . Bugs happen occasionally.
My experience too.
Your lesson: stop believing all the stuff you read.
Linux was born to have hiccups. So is Windows. I can make a Mac seize up pretty quick
To answer the title question you asked:
only two DD’s for me in 10 years. 7 crashes.
Me screwing something up being reckless: 4
The Update itself: 3
It will happen. Your three years is pretty good. The barometer? I think the folks with the newer cutting edge hardware have a harder time that older models (theory)
A great thread BTW these answers have been phenomenal
(1) Do you mean that the system (= the PC) is not running at all? The system is not even booting or the GUI is not coming up.
(2) Or the definition means that a single application is broken? Like cups, imap, dovecot, etc.?
I did not have (1) happen to me. But I saw (2) several times. You just need to look at https://archlinux.org/news/ to see how many “manual interventions” were needed in the past. The more complex your application environment is, the more often you seen breakages (2)
A year and a half without hiccups on EndeavourOS.
The key is to look at “manual interventions”, reading the pacman output while installing/updating the software and having backups.
To be frank, I had more issues while testing the unstable branch of Debian than while daily-driving EOS.
After 4+ years with EOS, I can say that the number of system-wide crashes are next-to zero. The only ones I can remember with my Xfce/Cinnamon setups had nothing to do with EOS/Arch: GRUB (self-inflicted after I forgot to update the bootloader files after a package upgrade) and freezing in Steam (caused by a bad RAM clock setting).
Now, in the few months I tried KDE I did suffer a few show-stopper crashes with plasma-shell and kwin (X11, not Wayland).
When I read the output from pacman, the system never breaks. If you pay attention to what pacman tells you, then you are prepared for anything. The thing with adding hardware, any issue with incompatibility is on the user’s shoulders. Do some research before purchasing new hardware and all problems can be avoided.
I had to go into rescue mode recently when I shrunk some partitions and apparently changed UUIDs therein. Always fun ;0
Otherwise Arch is pretty stable.