I have NVIDIA and I've had no issues with arch. There were the Wayland issues with how NVIDIA syncced frames and that being an issue but that's not distro specific and arch had a fix faster than others via AUR sooo.... 0 distro related issues in the 3 years already of using it.

I been using Arch for well over 5 years now I think, around whenever the RX 580 was released. Still using it. Only had like one major breakage due to not reading the arch news, and managed to easily recover with the skills I built by following a manual install (arch-chroot into an existing install from a live-usb to fix issue).

Windows taught me good to be a bit more cautious and curious

Doesn't it normally do the opposite for most people?

Almost guaranteed it does, especially if you can throw money at the problem, but a combination of general annoyance && subpar hardware && wish to play heavier games and launch heavier apps has a diceroll chance of pushing a person into inspecting what's going on under the hood. With w11 being itself and hardware prices skyrocketing, I hope many would get as angry as I am to get into that. Upgrading to a new laptop for the same price as the old one was never a worse decision that it is now.

The "Frankenstein state" is why nowadays I avoid traditional distros, Arch included. Traditional distros use something that programmers call the "imperative model". Basically, it means that you define tasks as a sequence of steps. But these steps have to account for infinitely many scenarios.

Every new version of a package adds some files, deletes some files, and runs some commands. Imagine you left your PC off for a month and now you need to upgrade a package from version 1 to version 10. The system has to figure out which files from version 1 can be kept, which files need to be installed from version 2, which files from version 3, etc, and then how to combine the commands from each version. Maybe it messes up and forgets to clean up a file or two. This might not be an issue now but over time these inconsistencies accumulate and the system diverges so far from mainstream that it breaks.

The modern atomic distros like Bazzite, use a model called the "declarative model". Instead of defining sequences of steps, you define the end goal. The system ensures that the final state matches the goal. Every update, is equivalent to re-installing the system from scratch (with clever optimizations so you don't actually need to re-download the whole system). Everything is consistent with the mainstream, and stays consistent, all the time. You can just turn on automatic updates and forget about it. No need to read news or release notes or PKGBUILD files. It is extremely robust and reliable.

This declarative model is what major cloud infrastructure has been moving towards in the past 20 years. Docker, Terraform, Gitops, IaC, etc. This is why the modern distros like Bazzite like to call themselves "cloud native" distros. These distros follow the same update model as major cloud infra.

Don't forget CoreOS and MicroOS.

It borks all the time but only because the disk becomes full due to snapper snapshots and pacman cache. I keep forgetting to clean up.

Nice notion.

But then...

The other replies.

Just stick these commands in a cron.weekly job or something, so you can forget about it:

paccache -rk2  # Remove packages from the cache, but keep the latest 2 versions
paccache -ruk0 # Remove packages from cache that are no longer installed

Woah

What other replies, almost all top comments are about arch being unreliable and the others are complaining about windows. The other replies support my claim bruh.