[dual_dingo]

I am not very experienced with Arch, but my impression is that it is actually more reliable when updating/upgrading then going to a new major MacOS release, which is an absolute disagrace given the fact that Apple can actually test their stuff on every single hardware model it is supposed to run.

And no, my experience on general user behaviour is to expect no backup, but this isn't Auntie Ednas crocheting Facebook group, but Hacker News :)

[jamil7]

> I am not very experienced with Arch, but my impression is that it is actually more reliable when updating/upgrading then going to a new major MacOS release

I used Arch briefly and this was not my experience, but at least in that community it's kind of expected that you understand this is a possibility and a tradeoff of running the OS.

[qwerty456127]

Use Manjaro then. It's a polished and reasonably tested Arch (roughly saying kind of like what Ubuntu is to Debian). Never had a single problem with it.

[pharmakom]

Ubuntu… polished? Ha!

[qwerty456127]

There always is a huge room for subjectivity, edge cases and other critique in this. But generally saying I'd say yes. My experience mostly is about desktop/laptop (non-gaming, on-board video only) though.

[heurisko]

Same. The Ubuntu long term support releases are quite conservative.

I did find the Unity interface more polished however.

It seemed like Canonical did a lot of UX research, to make things like the "power off" button adjoin the corner of the screen, so you could imprecisely flick the cursor and know it has hit the target. It also worked a lot better under old hardware.

I still use Unity with community support. It's a shame, I think as I remembered seeing the Unity interface at work sometimes and thinking that Ubuntu was making inroads.

[simion314]

>I am not very experienced with Arch, but my impression is that it is actually more reliable

It is only an impressions, Arch fanboyus will quietly try to fix the mess and blame themselves for the bugs, only some honest users will tell you straight in the face "never update Arch without first reading some news page and never update if you don't hve the time to rollback and fix shit".

[TimeBearingDown]

Both things are true.

Arch is, in my experience, much more stable, and yet you should glance at the news page and run full system upgrades when you could spare some downtime if you had to.

[II2II]

I would only call it a disgrace if the issue did not appear in testing yet appeared for a large number of users or if Apple released and update where problems appeared during testing.

Keep in mind these upgrades are being done to an OS that has a unique history based upon how the computer was used in the past. Issues that did not appear in testing are going to come up after release. Then there is the potential defects in the manufacture of a particular unit or due to how it was handled. In other words, it is legitimate to miss an uncommon fault.

As for Arch, I understand why the warnings exist. That being said, I have found it to be very reliable. I typically attribute it to changes being incremental, meaning that problems are less likely to arise; and due to development being done in the open, resulting in a larger pool of testers before it even hits rolling distributions like Arch (never mind distributions that do their own testing).

[circularfoyers]

I think the notable difference is that macOS has a standard release cycle of about a year, whereas Arch has a rolling release cycle. This why there's more possibility for breakage, as many of the core libraries or other software are likely having their versions bumped. This is based on my knowledge of how most standard release distros function and which I assume is Apple's update policy for software they ship.

Even assuming this is the case, it still doesn't excuse how they weren't able to uncover this in their testing, since they only have to test against their own set of hardware.

[ungamedplayer]

Imagine the hardware that arch has to support vs the hardware configurations that arch has to support.

Makes you think on the QE that goes into the release.