I had WAY more stability and packaging problems on Debian, Mint, and Ubuntu.

Mint is the only distro/os I ran for years without it ever freezing, crashing, or failing to boot. I’m expecting to have the exact same experience on MX, and it hasn’t disappointed so far.

I either had to add software that was not managed by the package database or had to add PPAs and third-party repos. Arch and the AUR have completely eliminated that problem.

How’s installing packages from random users any better than adding repos made by the devs? At least its got less of a chance to turn your machine into a mining rig…

I imagine Flatpaks help on those other distros but I love not HAVING to use Flatpak on Arch ( or EOS ).

I think flatpaks are the main reason why stable distros are growing in popularity. Most people only care about having a few programs up to date, and don’t have FOMO because they’re not bug testing plasma 6. Stable + flatpak is the perfect solution for that scenario.

Also, Nixpkgs > AUR in every way except ease of use.

These are very rare though and only in systems I have let get badly out-of-date

I’ve had the following scenario constantly repeat on my media device: don’t update for a month+ -> update -> fail to boot -> rollback -> try again after a few weeks -> boot

I understand the “theory” as to why a rolling release is “not stable”. My experience has not been that at all.

I ran endeavor for like 2 years, with 1-2 years of arch, arco, and garuda before that:

• the longer I used a single install, the more random bugs would start accumulating. For example on endeavor updates broke silently at some point, and I needed to manually mkinitcpio after a kernel update or it would fail to boot
• updates would randomly cause me to fail to boot (even when it’s not grub)
• crashed and froze from time to time

In the end I was working in a foreign country, and had to weigh whether the first -Syu of the month or just an -S would be more likely to mess up my system. I dropped arch the day after I got back home.

I’m not saying arch is horribly unstable, and no-one should use it, but people should be realistic about its issues. I’ve noticed that arch fans often think their survivorship bias is the proof that arch is the most stable distro ever created. It’s really not, but if someone is fine with occasionally having to debug their system (as I was for years), endeavor is probably the best option.