> Rolling releases are always going to have more problems than stable and tested releases. This is sinply mathematical and statistical fact.
lol.
I feel bad responding with just "lol", but I hope you do actually see how this is quite silly. There is indeed no simple mathematical or statistical fact that says running out of date software with downstream custom patches is more reliable than running the latest version from the developer. If anything, it can cause a lot of difficult-to-detect stability issues that may not impact all users or all use cases.
Not only that, but a big problem with "stable" distros is that most people don't want to use e.g. OBS from 2 years ago, so they need some way to run the latest software. Flatpak or Snap? Sure, but then how do you use e.g. OBS plugins? Suddenly, you are back at "OK, maybe I need a PPA" at which point you need to do things that will inevitably make your system less stable because you are now running somewhat of a "snowflake" configuration that gets more unique every time you add a new PPA or non-trivial modification. Whereas in Arch, you just install it from the package manager, or at worst, AUR, which due to the vastly simpler package management system, is a lot less prone to breakage.
Let me summarize:
- I don't agree that rolling release distros are inherently less stable overall. Stable distros are "tested" but blood, sweat and tears can only go so far. For some really compelling evidence, please ask the Linux kernel folks how their 'LTS' project went. As it turns out, maintaining LTS software is non-trivial in and of itself, and it introduces new problems that did not exist originally.
- Even if rolling release distros were inherently less stable, the reduced need to rely on third-party repositories, packages and even out-of-package-manager installations due to the more up to date packages would offset a lot of that, considering a large part of the problem with Debian/Ubuntu is also just simply that installations get borked too easily.
- Even if that weren't true, Arch's much simpler package management has less of a tendency to get tangled up in impossible-to-resolve dependency issues. Part of this is due to the nature of the AUR vs third-party PPAs, and part of it is just that it's literally much simpler overall, so there's less to go wrong. (Arch packages often err on the side of being less modular, which has its downsides but it certainly simplifies many things.)
- Even if that weren't true, my general experience running mainline Linux and bleeding edge packages for years as my primary operating environment suggests it's actually not very common to be hit with rolling release breakages. Usually people who release software do not just blindly release broken shit. Yes sure, regressions happen, this is a fact of life, but that doesn't mean that you're better off using old versions of things, there's definitely a balance, you don't get to have the benefits of having the newest fixes and never having a regression. In my opinion, frontloading the pain of rather occasional regressions is well worth getting the benefits of the new versions sooner, especially if rolling back is easy. And that, among other reasons, is Exactly why immutable Linux is the future.
P.S.: Yes, "that much" is a perfectly valid thing to say. I have spent many, many, many hours debugging Debian and Ubuntu issues, so the problem isn't that those distros never break and Arch does. The problem is that all distros break and Debian and Ubuntu installs mysteriously, despite being stable distros, absolutely seem to have the most trouble, especially during upgrades. And zero isn't an option. Windows installations break too. Sometimes, especially recently, every Windows installation breaks at once.