so a common claim I see made is that arch is up to date than Debian but harder to maintain and easier to break. Is there a good sort of middle ground distro between the reliability of Debian and the up-to-date packages of arch?

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[–] 1 point 2 years ago* (1 child)

And I hate when people take a single case and extrapolate it as a general statement.

By that argument Ubuntu is equally unstable as they have rolled out updates that broke grub resulting in unbootable systems - not during a full distro upgrade, but as Ubuntu specific patches to LTS.

In the end, we have choice, and choice is a good thing.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    The fact remains that Arch generally requires more work to maintain an installation than a typical point-release distro. I'm speaking from experience - I had two systems running Arch for over 2 years. I switched away when each system separately had a pacman update somehow get interrupted resulting in a borked install. I was using Mint before and Fedora now, and both are a lot more hands-off at the cost of some flexibility.

    Also, just to be clear, I'm not trying to disparage Arch at all. I think it's a really cool distro that's perfect for a certain type of user; I just don't think it's great to lead people to believe it's more reliable than it is in the way that I've been seeing online for a while now.

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