Comment by TiredOfLife
1 day ago
I use arch based linux. This year updates have broken video decoding twice. Font rendering once (still not fixed without manually deleting files.). And broken the whole system due to there not being a mechanism that makes sure all QT libraries upate at the same time once or twice. That is all one system.
Meanwhile 4 separate windows pcs have not had problems with updates for at least 6 years
It's not fair comparing Arch and Windows as they are two very different types of OSes. Arch is bleeding edge and it is completely normal and expected to be prone to breakages. It's not meant for the average PC user, it's meant for experienced users who're comfortable with troubleshooting technical issues, reporting bugs, and know and are happy to downgrade packages/rollback to previous snapshots etc. On the upside, Arch also gets fixes before anyone else.
If you want a stable Linux experience though, pick something like Fedora, or even better, pick an immutable distro like Aurora or Bazzite, if you really, really care about stability.
Do you mean Arch is getting more bleeding edge kernel versions? I don't see what else that's Arch-specific would cause those issues.
Arch is rolling release distro. That story would be different even if it was rolling release linux vs fixed release linux.
That said, even some fixed release linux distros break things almost every release. That's because Windows updates is just windows base + kernel + drivers, while most linux updates are everything all at once with no distinction between base system and user applications. Plus windows and macOS present certain things more or less as a blackbox to user - I never had broken DE and keyboard layout switcher during windows update, while every ubuntu update used to break everything for me.
It's not just the kernel, it's also mesa, KDE, pretty much everything really.
I use Arch exclusively and haven't had any of the issues you describe.
That said, I do occasionally deal with quirks due to the rolling distro nature of Arch. The benefits far outweigh the occasional upgrade pain IMO though.
How would you detect broken video decoding or font rendering? I don't know what those are. I don't think i've had any issues this year (Maybe i had do do some pacman-wrangling once this year, but i'm slow to update, so that was probably my fault...)), that I noticed anyway, but maybe everything's broken and i just can't tell.
That's an arch issue, not a Linux issue.