Arch only breaks if you don’t read the wiki.
Update the repo’s gpg keys, read the Arch news, do what manual steps they mention and you can update it after a year and it won’t break.
To be fair, the arch wiki is very good. I use it quite often despite not using arch. Quite a few things are valid on other distros, or you can get hints on how to fix it, like where to start looking.
Except, if any random program that you want to install requires a new version of a low-level library, you’re gonna have to do full system update today and not when upgrading the major version of the distro.
This is all entirely theoretical. In practice, yes, it’s easier if you don’t go too long between updates on Arch.
But “not to long” means once a month, not every day. And you should really not go more than a month between updates on any distro.
If you mean the system being screwed over by a dependency on a newer lib version, I’ve had that exact scenario triggered multiple times in Debian testing. (And in other distros too, really.)
FancyApp depends on libbutt >= 1.1. You have 1.0 installed.
libbutt 1.1 was compiled against glibc 2.43 and lists it as a dependency. You have 2.42.
Upgrading glibc triggers reinstalling half of the system, including low-level components, which in turn pull in updates of other low-level components that don’t themselves depend on glibc. Including the kernel.
But at least, with Ubuntu or whatever, this shouldn’t change the general workings of the system that would require manual adjustments from me.
Arch only breaks if you don’t read the wiki.
Update the repo’s gpg keys, read the Arch news, do what manual steps they mention and you can update it after a year and it won’t break.
My Arch install yesterday:
It somehow deleted the old kernel image from the boot partition but failed to write the new one (and I didn’t notice before rebooting).
I needed to rebuild the kernel via chroot from a live USB.
Finally found the ultimate reason why I’m not gonna use Arch.
To be fair, the arch wiki is very good. I use it quite often despite not using arch. Quite a few things are valid on other distros, or you can get hints on how to fix it, like where to start looking.
with all due respect to the arch project and all, but I don’t wanna do all that just to update my PC
It’s not more hassle than updating other distros after one year, cause they’ll throw a whole new major version at you. Here’s Debian’s upgrade instructions for a comparison:
https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/upgrading.en.html
What I wrote fits in a 6 line bash script, and there are much more sophisticated ready-made updaters available, too.
Joke’s on you, Pop hasn’t had a major update in years!
Except, if any random program that you want to install requires a new version of a low-level library, you’re gonna have to do full system update today and not when upgrading the major version of the distro.
This is why I use Nixos.
It can update single apps independently.
In theory you could update single kernel modules, but that obviously makes the shit unstable.
This is all entirely theoretical. In practice, yes, it’s easier if you don’t go too long between updates on Arch.
But “not to long” means once a month, not every day. And you should really not go more than a month between updates on any distro.
If you mean the system being screwed over by a dependency on a newer lib version, I’ve had that exact scenario triggered multiple times in Debian testing. (And in other distros too, really.)
FancyApp depends on libbutt >= 1.1. You have 1.0 installed.
libbutt 1.1 was compiled against glibc 2.43 and lists it as a dependency. You have 2.42.
Upgrading glibc triggers reinstalling half of the system, including low-level components, which in turn pull in updates of other low-level components that don’t themselves depend on glibc. Including the kernel.
But at least, with Ubuntu or whatever, this shouldn’t change the general workings of the system that would require manual adjustments from me.