libpng has done it, as has libjpeg. Grub did it, unexpected kernel updates have done it, and updates to wireless driver packages - which was particularly egregious.
I first want to emphasize that I'm sorry you multiple rough experiences, and I'll concede that Arch seems to not meet your needs (especially your hardware needs, apparently).
But, for anyone else reading, I'll say that I ran Arch on my personal laptop from about 2009 to 2020 before I finally stopped using that machine altogether, and I've run Arch on my current personal laptop from about 2015/2016 until now. This current one has an Nvidia GPU, which is a little hit or miss depending on the kernel/driver version.
At various points I've definitely had to spend some time fixing things after updates, but almost all of those were because of packages I had installed from the AUR (a community "repository" of unofficial, untrusted, packages maintained by individual users) that either updated before or after my official Arch packages did, which cause dependency issues. This is certainly no different than any Linux distro where you install a third-party package outside of the official channels that also depends on specific versions of packages being present.
Other times, things broke because I was doing hacky shit, like custom kernel patches.
Certainly there were a few times that breaking changes came from official updates. There was always enough info on the Arch main page and/or forums to either prevent a breakage or to quickly fix it.
This is the price we pay for a rolling release instead of periodic major releases like most popular distros do. I've run Ubuntu on several machines and I've never done a version upgrade without it borking something (often times it was the GRUB config not being updated correctly and failing to boot). Granted, it's been several years since attempting an Ubuntu major version upgrade, so maybe they're awesome and smooth now--I don't know.
I ran Arch on my first laptop for 10 years without ever wiping and reinstalling it. I've run it on my current laptop for going on 7 years (the machine is falling apart, so it probably won't make it to 10, but not because of the OS) without reinstalling. The most fiddling I have to do with my current one is that I sometimes switch between the proprietary Nvidia driver and the free Nouveau driver.
Now, Arch is not for everyone. If you don't want to actually touch config files for all of your underlying system services, and don't want to think about how to partition your disk or what filesystem to use, Arch is no fun. And, to be completely honest, if I weren't already very familiar with Arch, I might not have the energy/time to get into it today. But, I feel lucky that I found Arch when I was young and had not much better to do than tinker around with my computer's OS, because I get pretty frustrated and overwhelmed these days when I have to use something like Ubuntu where I feel like it's a little harder to do anything that's not "standard" (though, I'm not necessarily saying Ubuntu does stuff wrong--just that I like how transparent Arch is).
But, for anyone else reading, I'll say that I ran Arch on my personal laptop from about 2009 to 2020 before I finally stopped using that machine altogether, and I've run Arch on my current personal laptop from about 2015/2016 until now. This current one has an Nvidia GPU, which is a little hit or miss depending on the kernel/driver version.
At various points I've definitely had to spend some time fixing things after updates, but almost all of those were because of packages I had installed from the AUR (a community "repository" of unofficial, untrusted, packages maintained by individual users) that either updated before or after my official Arch packages did, which cause dependency issues. This is certainly no different than any Linux distro where you install a third-party package outside of the official channels that also depends on specific versions of packages being present.
Other times, things broke because I was doing hacky shit, like custom kernel patches.
Certainly there were a few times that breaking changes came from official updates. There was always enough info on the Arch main page and/or forums to either prevent a breakage or to quickly fix it.
This is the price we pay for a rolling release instead of periodic major releases like most popular distros do. I've run Ubuntu on several machines and I've never done a version upgrade without it borking something (often times it was the GRUB config not being updated correctly and failing to boot). Granted, it's been several years since attempting an Ubuntu major version upgrade, so maybe they're awesome and smooth now--I don't know.
I ran Arch on my first laptop for 10 years without ever wiping and reinstalling it. I've run it on my current laptop for going on 7 years (the machine is falling apart, so it probably won't make it to 10, but not because of the OS) without reinstalling. The most fiddling I have to do with my current one is that I sometimes switch between the proprietary Nvidia driver and the free Nouveau driver.
Now, Arch is not for everyone. If you don't want to actually touch config files for all of your underlying system services, and don't want to think about how to partition your disk or what filesystem to use, Arch is no fun. And, to be completely honest, if I weren't already very familiar with Arch, I might not have the energy/time to get into it today. But, I feel lucky that I found Arch when I was young and had not much better to do than tinker around with my computer's OS, because I get pretty frustrated and overwhelmed these days when I have to use something like Ubuntu where I feel like it's a little harder to do anything that's not "standard" (though, I'm not necessarily saying Ubuntu does stuff wrong--just that I like how transparent Arch is).