Please understand that I haven’t tried or installed Arch Linux yet. From what I understand by reading and watching related videos, Arch is often breaks and a lot of time is required to fix issues. But I have also read comments from arch users who claim that arch has only crashed or caused them problems only a couple of times in a year.
Wouldn’t a stable or non rolling release distro be a great choice for the Steam Deck?? Also, how frequently do the packages get updated on steam os?
Valve devs said they like Arch because it allows them to update steam deck faster than other distros. Looks like they’re skilled enough to limit the downsides of an unstable distro in order to get the latest and greatest package versions.
Arch is actually really stable if you keep it updated. Where it gets ya is if you don’t update it for a couple months or longer.
I just pacman -Syyu every hour an I’m fine.
But really, Arch has been extremely stable. Any issues I’ve had have all been solved in a few minutes after looking at the news on https://archlinux.org/
This has been my exact experience in the 8 years I’ve been using it as my desktop OS. Boot into windows to play some game I can’t get working, beat it a month later, come back and I need to get my boxing gloves out to use my computer again
Please explain this to me. It is stable till it’s not? What happens during that time that makes arch no longer stable?
If you go a long time without updating there are generally lots of updates. So when you update sometimes you can have dependency issues. Basic maintenance prevents this.
Personally I never have this issue and generally don’t have any issues with Arch. Truly have no idea why people think it’s unstable. Maybe bad experiences with Manjaro which is Arch based. Now that distro has stability issues! Garuda and vanilla arch have been rock solid as far as my experience goes.
Have a project that I may have to go donw this route. Haven’t touched Arch in many years so I’d figure it be more “stable”. Didn’t know if there were inherent issues. Doesn’t sound like there is just basic maintenance. Thanks for explaining.