[jff]

My experience with Arch has frequently been:

1. Run pacman -Syu

2. Pacman failed.

3. Go to Arch website

4. Learn that I shouldn't have run pacman just then, and now I have to follow these steps to un-break my system

The most notable instance was when Arch decided that /usr/lib should be a symlink to /lib. Yeah, barely recovered from that... it was also a reinforcement of my position that basic utilities should be statically linked.

I finally gave up on Arch when a GRUB update broke my system and locked me out of my encrypted root.

[adwf]

Yeah I got caught by forcing the /usr/lib update too. Went away for a month, came back and did a full upgrade, failed. Checked the website, the news had dropped of the front page, forced update, broke it horribly.

Despite the problems, I still find rolling release vastly preferable. If Ubuntu can bring some of the commercial support quality to a rolling release, they'd alleviate a lot of the difficulties that I have with Arch.

[deepdog]

> forcing the /usr/lib update

That's the number one thing to remember with pacman, _never_ force an update. That is how 90% [citation needed] of problems arise.