Debian is like Arch but the opposite
I really feel like easy internet access has taken good documentation away from us. It's too easy to Google for something, find some crappy blog with barely enough instructions to fix the problem. We've become reactive, rather than pro-actively educating ourselves.
I find the Gentoo wiki has the clearest information about specific things, and the Arch wiki has the clearest information on how to put them together.
This is "Arch is unstable" thing is very much a myth pushed forward by people who only dabbled with Arch once or twice then had it break, then completely dismissed it as unstable. Without first learning how to use it even at an intermediate level - not even expert.
I too had Arch break when I was a newbie but I learned quickly how not to and it's been incredibly stable ever since. Not worse than Debian and more so than Fedora in my experience.
In retrospect my actions which had broke it originally had little to do with ArchLinux itself but a general inexperience with Linux and over-eagerness when using beta software (which you have to opt in to, it's not default with Arch).
The end result is that I've come out of it a far better Linux user with skills highly applicable to Debian and other distros. It's a far easy place to learn Linux/Unix properly and become familiarized with the OS/dir structure/config than any other distro.
I don’t have to be careful about opting in to beta software or anything else with NixOS. If I want to try something, I can do so, and roll right back if it doesn’t work out. The destructive nature of Arch package installs and updates is its biggest flaw.
This accurately describes my experience. I stopped using Arch around the time git broke when I updated. I'm not clear what mistake I made. What level of Arch intermediate or expert level Arch knowledge is required to keep git working?
I've been running Arch for about three years now and I've had one very minor problem when I didn't read the notes properly.