“unstable” as in changing regularly. Not in any way to do with how reliable it is (as another comment mentioned, that’s a better way to differentiate).
I’ve had far fewer problems updating arch (once I had a clean system anyway) than I ever did trying to move through distribution updates on various other more “standard” ones.
It’s extremely rare. Big breaking updates are normally shown in the arch news. Usually they just require a command or two to remove a conflicting package before the update. I think there’s been a few in the last year, but on the flip side I never got a clean distro update on anything but Debian and they usually took a lot more effort to clean up.
Where it may be “unstable” is if a specific program updates (upstream) with some major change or other, whereas another distro might hold off a while.
“unstable” as in changing regularly. Not in any way to do with how reliable it is (as another comment mentioned, that’s a better way to differentiate).
I’ve had far fewer problems updating arch (once I had a clean system anyway) than I ever did trying to move through distribution updates on various other more “standard” ones.
So the updates don’t tend to break things? Is it just annoying to constantly update?
It’s extremely rare. Big breaking updates are normally shown in the arch news. Usually they just require a command or two to remove a conflicting package before the update. I think there’s been a few in the last year, but on the flip side I never got a clean distro update on anything but Debian and they usually took a lot more effort to clean up.
Where it may be “unstable” is if a specific program updates (upstream) with some major change or other, whereas another distro might hold off a while.
Makes sense, thank you!