Can we please stop with the FUD around Arch and poor stability? It's an old meme which will never die, but it has no basis in reality. I've been using Arch on my personal and work laptops for probably 7 years now and the only time it had been a problem has been due to layer 8 issues and doing something stupid. I certainly wouldn't be using it for work if it was unstable.
I used to run arch on my desktop for a while because it was the closest to thing to FreeBSD. Didn't use Linux on the desktop before (well, went through a few distros within a month).
Never had any issues with updating or using it, but it's because I have set up everything myself and never touched AUR. Still nuked it favor on FreeBSD and then NixOS eventually tho.
This is true, I guess it's very dependent on the use you have for the machine. In my case i migrated from Ubuntu to arch on my work machine when I had a week off - obviously I needed it to work otherwise I would be in some trouble the following Monday.
It's not FUD. If you stay very light then it is very stable, but the more stuff you add, the worse it gets (gnome extensions anybody?)
I love Arch, but it is a demanding mistress. If you get behind on updates, you're asking for pain. Also it can be very disruptive to suddenly get a new major version of Gnome that breaks extensions you used, or applications, etc.
What we instead should say is not that Arch is "unstable" because I agree it's not, but rather that Arch requires a lot more care and feeding and if you don't do that, it can lead to instability
I used Arch for years, and left it due to poor stability. Every time I would try to use an AUR app it would be broken and need re-installing. Sure the non-AUR stuff was mostly fine, but a lot of necessary applictions are in AUR, and AUR is touted as a major selling point of Arch. When there was an issue during a system update, recovering the system was a mess. I also cannot call it stable when you can't update one application without updating the rest of the system.
I switched to Gentoo and it fixed all the issues I was encountering with Arch, and was more stable. Now I'm on NixOS, which is far more stable than Arch or Gentoo were.
Now, that said, the way SteamOS uses it, I don't see any issues. With an immutable system, A/B updates, and tested images, the compatibility and update issues are solved. Using flatpak for user applications solves the rest of the noted issues. Would be ideal if I could install with Nix instead of Flatpak, but ran into some trouble there.
Counterpoint to this; I have many packages from the AUR and I've never had any issues like you describe with them. Both of our viewpoints are polar opposites but they are only a single datapoint each.
