In my experience they’re the same from a reliability standpoint. Stuff on Arch will break for no reason after an update. Stuff on Debian will break for no reason after an update. It’s just as difficult to solve reliability problems on both.
Because Debian isn’t a rolling release you will often run into issues where a bug got fixed in a future version of whatever program it is but not the one that’s available in the repository. Try using yt-dlp on any stable Debian installation and it won’t work for example.
Arch isn’t without its issues. Half of the good stuff is on the AUR, and fuck the AUR. Stuff only installs without issues half the time. Good luck installing stuff that needs like 13+ other AUR packages as dependencies because non of that shit can be installed automatically. On other distros,all that stuff can be installed automatically and easily with a single command.
You can get yay for an AUR package manager, but it’s generally not recommended because it means blindly trusting the build scripts for community packages that have no real oversight. You’re typically advised to check the build script for every AUR package you install.
I’ve had the exact opposite experience. I switched to Arch when proton came out, and I haven’t had a system breakage since that wasn’t directly caused by my actions.
Debian upgrades would basically fail to boot about 20% of the time before that.
Stuff on Debian will break for no reason after an update
I have never had this happen on Debian servers and I’ve been using it for around 20 years. The only time I broke a Debian system was my fault - I tried to upgrade an old server from Debian 10 to 12. It’s only supported to upgrade one version at a time. Had to restore from backup and upgrade to Debian 11 first, then to 12.
I heard this so many times that I really believed arch was so brittle that my system would become unbootable if I went on vacation. Turns out updating it after 6 months went perfectly fine.
I updated arch after two months and it broke completely, i guess it’s because i had unfathomable amount of packages and dependencies, so it varies from person to person, if you keep your system light then it may work like it worked for you, if you install giant amount of packages and dependencies then it would work like it worked for me
In my experience they’re the same from a reliability standpoint. Stuff on Arch will break for no reason after an update. Stuff on Debian will break for no reason after an update. It’s just as difficult to solve reliability problems on both.
Because Debian isn’t a rolling release you will often run into issues where a bug got fixed in a future version of whatever program it is but not the one that’s available in the repository. Try using yt-dlp on any stable Debian installation and it won’t work for example.
Arch isn’t without its issues. Half of the good stuff is on the AUR, and fuck the AUR. Stuff only installs without issues half the time. Good luck installing stuff that needs like 13+ other AUR packages as dependencies because non of that shit can be installed automatically. On other distros,all that stuff can be installed automatically and easily with a single command.
I use Arch btw.
You can get yay for an AUR package manager, but it’s generally not recommended because it means blindly trusting the build scripts for community packages that have no real oversight. You’re typically advised to check the build script for every AUR package you install.
I have never had anything break on Debian. It has been running for years on attended upgrades
I have never had anything break on Debian.
I use Arch btw.
I’ve had the exact opposite experience. I switched to Arch when proton came out, and I haven’t had a system breakage since that wasn’t directly caused by my actions.
Debian upgrades would basically fail to boot about 20% of the time before that.
I have never had this happen on Debian servers and I’ve been using it for around 20 years. The only time I broke a Debian system was my fault - I tried to upgrade an old server from Debian 10 to 12. It’s only supported to upgrade one version at a time. Had to restore from backup and upgrade to Debian 11 first, then to 12.
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I heard this so many times that I really believed arch was so brittle that my system would become unbootable if I went on vacation. Turns out updating it after 6 months went perfectly fine.
I once updated an Arch that was 2y out of date, and it went perfectly fine.
But didn’t it take a while? Not that it wouldn’t take a while on Debian but Debian doesn’t push so many updates
Not really. It’d just skip all the incremental updates and go straight to latest.
It took a bit more than usual but nothing unreasonable. 3 to 5 minutes at most, in an old MacBook pro.
I updated arch after two months and it broke completely, i guess it’s because i had unfathomable amount of packages and dependencies, so it varies from person to person, if you keep your system light then it may work like it worked for you, if you install giant amount of packages and dependencies then it would work like it worked for me