> not once have I stopped and thought "huh, this is actually pretty usable and stable".
I think we need to have a specific audience in mind when saying whether or not it's stable. My Arch desktop (user: me) is actually really stable, despite the reputation. I have something that goes sideways maybe once a year or so, and it's a fairly easy fix for me when that does happen. But despite that, I would never give my non-techy parents an Arch desktop. Different users can have different ideas of stable.
My problem with Arch 12 years ago was exactly the fact that things would just randomly stop working and I often wouldn’t know until I needed it. What drew the line for me was when I needed to open a USB pendrive and it wouldn’t mount — if I remember correctly something related to udisk at the time and a race condition. I spent like 30 minutes looking into it and it was just embarrassing as I had someone over my shoulder waiting for those files.
This is when I gave up and switched to Apple. I am now moving back to Linux but Arch still seems like it’s too hacky and too little structured organizationally to be considered trustworthy. So, Ubuntu or Debian it is, but fully haven’t decided yet.
Still, I would be happy to be convinced otherwise. I’m particularly surprised Steam uses it for their OS.
I have been using arch for about a year now.
I've crapped my system on install, or when trying to reconfigure core features.
Updates? 0 issues. Like genuinely, none.
I've used Ubuntu and Mint before and Arch "just works" more then either of them in my experience.
I had awful experiences with arch over a decade ago. I started using it again last year and it's been completely solid and the least problematic Linux distribution that I've used in ages.