The "Arch breaks all the time" people have obviously never used Arch.
I've run Arch as a daily driver for the last 4 and a half years and haven't had any issues. I've tried Pop_OS twice in that time and had install-breaking issues within a week in both cases.
I used arch for 1.5 years and it did break a lot. Though I did use nvidia, so it was to be expected.
Switched to Nixos yesterday because it was kind of anxiety-inducing knowing my main computer was sitting on a time bomb that only got worse as time went on, as I toyed with the system more and more
Absolutely loved arch though, and I hope I’ll love nix as well
Literally switched off nix today because of a few mandatory (for me) packages were broken and I already regret it. Nix is such an awesome is and its impossible to break. Unlike Debian that fucked itself because rfkill wasint installed and that borked my networking on my PC. Couldn't start my nic or anything and stayed up til 2 am trying to fix til I said fuck it and re-installed. Switching back to nix tomorrow!
I run Manjaro with KDE on X11.... I use a lot of mouse gestures, so I can't sit with Wayland.
I found the SYSTEM is extremely stable for ME. It is important to say this every time...
I find KDE is often less stable... I had at least 2 issues I couldn't explain/understand and just fixed with restoring contents of .config from snapshots.
This is one area where Manjaro 'held back' and did actually save us from a lot of the bleeding edge (5.26 was a rough ride)... but that's not an 'Arch' issue, that's a 'KDE' issue.
But the USER likes to tip the boat until it does a barrel roll, or sinks entirely... and this is mostly what divides the happy users. Sometimes it's just basic hardware, sometimes it's the USER habits/modus operandi.
So we have Snapshots, and we have rsync backups to a mounted drive.... Then it matters not - a quick restart fixes most issues, and a reinstall takes only 6 minutes with no data lost -> in backups.
That's stable enough for me.
BTW, I use AUR quite a lot - and it never actually caused me an issue, other than some stuff needing rebuilds.
exactly this. there is a reason all the experienced users ultimately end up on arch. the old arch sub used to say "all paths lead to arch". seems like no matter what distro you start with, eventually you'll find your self using arch for your personal daily driver due to its resources making it quick and easy to get things working.