[hollerith]

Unlike Debian, Arch Linux has what they call a "rolling release schedule," which means that the only choices you have are (1) refrain from using Pacman at all to update your software, which of course leaves security vulnerabilities unpatched and (2) opening yourself up to major changes to major subsystems, like Gnome, any time you use pacman to update your system.

In contrast, on Debian, major changes to e.g. Gnome are mostly limited to when a new version of Debian comes out, and you get a lot of leeway as to when to upgrade to the new version, and in particular, sometimes you have the option of subscribing to just the security patches for your version of Debian -- an option that Arch Linux just does not offer at all.

And I got the impression that updates of Arch Linux broke things that required my manual intervention to fix more than updates of Debian did.

Still it is a very compelling distribution because of its "elegance".

I probably spend just as much time maintaining my OS X box as I did maintaining my Arch Linux box: e.g., when I upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard and from Snow Leopard to Lion, I had to install a bunch of stuff (a dict client, Gnu coreutils, Carbon Emacs, even wget IIRC) to get a comfortable environment, and the installation took a lot more time than it would have on a Linux distro. E.g., the upgrade to OS X 10.7.3 changed the behavior of sleep mode such that simply bumping the mouse wakes the system, which eliminates most of the value I used to get from putting the system to sleep, so now I have to ask on some forum for a way to revert to the OS X 10.7.2 behavior of waking only on key press or mouse button click.

[lloeki]

> And I got the impression that updates of Arch broke things that required my manual intervention to fix more than updates of Debian did.

Maybe it looks more 'frequent' but when it does so it's in a much, much more limited scope each time. It's more like small, discrete steps vs a whole batch at once.

> you have the option of subscribing to just the security patches for your version of Debian -- an option that Arch Linux just does not offer at all.

That's because Arch subscribes to the opinion that upstream knows best, and puts emphasis on as much vanilla as possible (which contributes to its overall simplicity, leanness and elegance). Hence security update means version bump from upstream. Contrast with Debian which actively back ports security patches to the pinned version in each release.

> E.g., the upgrade to OS X 10.7.3 changed the behavior of sleep mode such that simply bumping the mouse wakes the system, which eliminates most of the value I used to get from putting the system to sleep, so now I have to ask on some forum for a way to revert to the OS X 10.7.2 behavior of waking only on key press or mouse button click.

Ironically (although I did not notice that particular behavior myself) this would restore the pre-Lion behavior.

[dsrguru]

I've been using Arch for about five years, and I can tell you that things break more frequently than with any other distro I've used for a suffiently long amount of time. Things break more frequently when you're tinkering with things, but sometimes even on routine updates. If you want something more stable, use Debian Testing or Slackware. That being said, Arch is great. Try it!

[lloeki]

> things break more frequently

Yes it might be more frequent, yet each time it is of a more limited scope since it concerns a single, maybe two packages. Following the news and maybe the forums helps a lot. Example regarding the scope: I upgraded some machines Ubuntu 11.04 to 11.10, and so much breakage occurred that the machines required such an extend of work that they simply were declared unrecoverable and reinstalled from scratch.

> use Debian Testing

In the months following a release, Debian testing essentially == Sid, and breakage is infamous.

[dsrguru]

Yes, following the news is incredibly useful for preventing breakage on updates, and the forums are especially useful for repairing breakage since other people will often have had the same issue on a big update. Probably half the time something "breaks" on a `pacman -Syu' for me, it's just a quick fix that was the result of me neglecting to read the front page news.