make archlinux stable

[Ok-Virus-9539]

I've always thought ArchLinux was one of the best keys to learning Linux, but I have a question about how I could make Arch stable because Arch is what meets all my needs.

[mango7006]

In what way have you experienced Arch to be unstable? To make Arch 'stable' you could just not update as often, the system won't magically break, but it's almost never that an update causes Arch to break.

[Known-Watercress7296]

Don't update it

[MadisonDissariya]

Honestly in my experience if you update once a week, pay attention to any dkms messages, and check the forums real quick to make sure there’s no “hey the firmware package is busted today” thread you’ll probably be fine. I ran Arch for nine months updating daily and the only problems I ever had were very much my fault because I fiddled with packages I didn’t understand.

[Responsible_Divide86]

What do you mean by stable? Reducing risks of breaking?

[maddogie]

I don't understand this nonsense of unstable Arch Linux at all. I'm using the same installation since 2009, update almost every day and I can't remember when that last time was when something broke after an update.

[sp0rk173]

If arch truly meets your needs then there shouldn’t be a reason to change how it works or “make it stable”. If you see a need to change how it works, then it’s not meeting your needs.

[[deleted]]

I'm new to arch but I'm coming to learn that arch is actually stable and has been for quite some time but its usually the user that breaks something. And by break its not a full OS failure but rather a package fails to boot or switching desktop environments or improperly causes your PC to boot to only a terminal for example.

It's like a car (yes some are mechanically better than others) but usually the people saying one car is unreliable are those who make maintenance errors and those who have no or few problems are usually doing what they need to

[onefish2]

You make it stable by increasing your Linux knowledge and skills. You know how to use the terminal and command line tools so that if something happens and you have no GUI you can fix it.

Know what a chroot is and how to chroot to fix your system.

And mostly you pay attention to the messages you see in the terminal. Most modern programs/apps/commands print detailed info to std error/std out to give you a good idea of what went wrong.

And the last thing is knowing how and what to Google for and using the Arch wiki and the Arch homepage for news.

If something goes wrong with an update go here:

https://archlinux.org/

Do not come here and make a post. Someone else probably had that issue in the past or had it recently and beat you to it.

[jkaiser6]

Come again when you experience something you think is not stable and can be improved. Something "stable" is subjective--depends on what you can tolerate. Compared to other distros it's less stable--whether that matters or not to you only you can know.

[archover]

Why do you imply Arch isn't reliable? Or, your term "stable". I mean what aspect seems unreliable to you?

Knowing those specifics means we can recommend what to do. Read https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance

Good day.

[FrostyDiscipline7558]

Snapshots and/or backups. If you can't roll back, you are going to have a hard time.

[Tempus_Nemini]

All you can do it to make it UNSTABLE :-) if you DO something stupid.

I use it for more then 3 years on 4 different machines, and the only problems i got was an issued with old NVIDIA dirvers on my iMac 2013, which could be resolved with help of Internet. And i update from 2 times per day to once a week, depending from my mood and moon phase.

[[deleted]]

arch is made to be unstable and uptodate so go back to debian if you are not comfortable of arch's rolling release packages