[vurudlxtyt]

People like to parrot this but I've literally never had a breaking change from an upgrade in ~5-6 years of Arch usage. At least, if I did, it didn't take more than a couple minutes to fix, because I honestly don't remember having issues.

On the other hand doing a dist-upgrade on Ubuntu has burned me more than once. I fear having to do it on one of my home servers, and should really get off of it.

I'd argue that updating more often is more safe, since anything that goes wrong will be incremental and likely easier to deal with if it does. (Not appropriate for a production server though, you don't want things to change on that unless it's deliberate and likely infrequent)

[Comevius]

Same experience here with 15 years of Arch usage, a few major issues before systemd, none since, except having to migrate the boot loader, network manager and so on to systemd and from time to time having to use a workaround from the latest news at archlinux.org. I have also migrated to pipewire a month ago with a single command and no issues.

It's quite stress free, because the whole operating system is basically the kernel, systemd, x11 or wayland, pulseaudio or pipewire, the nvidia driver and pacman. Not much can go wrong.

[zibzab]

Actually, I tried arch again last month after unfa's video on pipewire support.

Couldn't even revert back to PA when PW failed, the entire system had to be reinstalled.

Can you make it work? Absolutely. Can it fail catastrophically if you make one little mistake? Absolutely.

[Comevius]

PipeWire is basically the files pacman installed, and systemd user services.

This command would have been able to remove it:

  pacman -Rsn pipewire pipewire-pulse pipewire-alsa

And this disable it:

  systemctl disable --user pipewire pipewire-media-session pipewire-pulse

A common mistake when installing it is forgetting to install pipewire-pulse and pipewire-alsa.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire