[boomboomsubban]

>for an update to break just because I didn't update for a month,

I don't understand why people thing infrequent updates will break things. This idea seems to have started spreading a few years ago, but nobody I ask can tell me why Arch would break if you didn't update frequently enough.

[washadjeffmad]

Arch is great when you live and breathe it, but it's pretty much the only distro that has required reading to know when manual intervention is required and what the latest problem packages are just to run updates.

And if you aren't part of Arch culture and already know that you need to know this, or you step away from a system for long enough and miss some Arch News, you're going to have a uniquely Arch experience when you reflexively pacman -Syu instead of running informant or checkupdates first.

Is it illogical and inscrutable? Not at all. Does it sometimes skip a few steps here and there that can trip up both new users and old ones? For sure.

[boomboomsubban]

While needing to read the news may be specific to Arch, it's going to cause the same problems if you don't read the news before daily updates or yearly updates. It doesn't explain the idea that rare updates is guaranteed breakage.

[smeagull]

This comes from having used Arch for years previously.

Arch breaks things all the time. They've needed specific /etc updates, fixes to unbreak config changes, and as I alluded to, holding off updates to stop breaking due to uneven updates of incredibly common shared libraries