[mezuzza]

I've used Arch since at least 2011 and I know exactly what you're talking about. When I first started using it, it had the stupid blue install script (pacstrap was it?).

Around that time, I had to reinstall arch ~4 times for some reason or another. It was not a great experience. It made me learn a lot of Linux stuff just to keep it up and hitting `pacman -Syyu` was always a scary thing to do. You could never hit yes to prompts without first going to archlinux.org first to make sure that there was no arcane ceremony to conduct before you upgraded your system (I probably know enough now that it would no longer be arcane, but, hey, we all have to start from nothing).

My experience since around 2014 has been drastically different. Things have been incredibly stable and I've never had to reinstall arch in the past 3 years. I don't really know what caused the change - maybe it was just maturity - but I do welcome it and working on arch has been amazing. I'm saying this not to convince you to go back, but to allay others' fears that Arch is unapproachable or impossible to deal with. At this point, it's still a hard Linux to work with, but it's no harder than any Linux in which you have to work on the command line.

[Shikadi]

I started using Arch sometime before you did, and had the exact same experience - Something happened between 2012 and 2014 that made Arch the most stable Linux distro I've ever used. Arguably more stable than Windows 10, depending on your opinions of Microsoft's execution of forced updates.