[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.