ArchLinux has been very stable for me, as long as I did not choose BTRFS as my filesystem during the install process.
I did have a few problems with the major overhaul of KDE, but I super enjoy the new look and feel. I’m not sure if Arch being a rolling release allowed me to have the latest KDE faster, but I’m glad I have it.
What problems have you had with btrfs? None here for years.
What’s wrong with btrfs
I have similar experiences, have been using it for a year now, works … fine.
Nothing broke, seems stable.
I can go weeks, dozens of sleep cycles and never see a hint of instability with my Arch daily driver. It only needs a reboot after update and didn’t even ask for it.
My windows computer (work, 2025 lenovo, fresh install) can’t make it an hour without explorer crashing. They also fucked up task manager… The latest new bug is right and left click getting swapped requiring a reboot. I never imagined that was even possible.
Rolling release distros are not unstable.
As others have said, “stable” and “unstable” have a different connotation in the FOSS world.
Rolling releases probably don’t have more software crashes than their stable counterparts, which is what you meant.
However, some use cases prefer that they are able to use the same config for a long time, and when software updates frequently, system administration can become a cat-and-mouse game of “What config broke this time?” That’s not to say rolling release is bad, but sometimes it’s like using a power drill instead of a screw driver.
Also, I definitely feel like a stable distro is more likely to survive a software update after not using the computer for a few months to a year. Granted, I’ve had a Debian Testing (rolling release) install that did survive an upgrade after a year of non-use, but I’ve also seen Arch VMs that broke after just a couple months of non-use, forcing me to reinstall.
Maybe you’re right. But arch is stable.
The term “stable” is not meant to be used as a synonym for “reliable” when describing distros.
Depends on your definition of “reliable” 😉
I know, I was referring to the heading implying otherwise:
It turned out to be more stable than I expected.
Exactly. The term “stable” in connection with software has the same problems of “free”; without understanding the context, it can be interpreted wrongly. “stable” type of distributions are meant to be “unchanging” in the sense of feature freeze. That off course depends on the distro or software in general how far this goes. Archlinux is “unstable” in the sense it is ever changing and adapting new technologies by breaking compatibility; something Debian does not.
It depends on the distribution. In example Manjaro was unstable for me, while EndeavourOS is stable for the most part. In fact, Manjaro was holding back packages and is less rolling release than EndeavourOS, and yet less stable (for me). :D
Buys an NVIDIA GPU, complains it doesn’t work with Wayland. Classic.
buys an Nvidia GPU, complains
classic
I also had some problems with my nvidia gpu around a year ago when I switched over to linux.
I’m not sure whether this was wayland specific, but when the GPU’s clock speed would jump up after some time of inactivity it would cause this sort of stutter / lag for that 1 second of transition. Was really annoying, I had to change the minimum clock speed, it did help. I eventually switched to a AMD gpu and everything worked perfectly without me needing to do anything.
And in general I had a couple of more problems with some electron apps back then (Obsidian), that did not work well when forced to run wayland. Though this was probably not nvidia specific. Eventually I remember finding some sort of fix for it by setting some obscure environment variable that I found on hyprlands discord that was recently made available.
The only gpu i had problems with on fedora was a Intel B580. Both nvidia and amd worked just fine
I currently have two Wayland-running computers: one with Intel graphics and the other with Nvidia. While both work, one has some odd quirks. For instance, right-click window scaling doesn’t work at all and context menus vanish instantly unless I hold the mouse button down. Sometimes, the right-click menu simply doesn’t appear at all.
Incidentally, I’m currently looking for a used AMD graphics card. Can you guess which computer will get that card.
NVIDIA is still used by people. There shouldn’t be a push for Wayland if Wayland doesn’t work on hardware that majority of people use.
I myself am on full AMD hardware, yet won’t switch to Wayland unless there is an actual reason to do so. X works just fine for me.
The devs aren’t anybody’s lackeys either. Many are doing it for free in their own time. If you dont want Wayland, then support X11 with code, money, or documentation. If you don’t support the X11 devs and maintainers, then you’re making a decision to let it die and nobody’s “forcing you” to use Wayland.
Developers can do whatever the hell they like with their own software and shouldn’t let themselves be beholden to Nvidia.
Nvidia is being dragged kicking and screaming into using something that everyone else decided was the standard years ago, and that’s a good thing.
Have fun with Xorg. I hope it works well for you forever. Truly.
I see no reason why hardware support should get any worse for you so no problems there. And it will be a while yet before most apps stop running on Xorg.
The 78 percent of us using Wayland don’t need updates though. Thanks.
right. I got an AMD and the driver is utter shit. I had to disable features using kernel cmdline bitmask flags, so that it doesn’t crash every 2 hours. wayland + amd classic.
never had compositor or display server issues with nvidia on linux.
What GPU model is it? And what distro are you using?
Did you install separate AMD drivers? You’re generally not supposed to do that; it’s just plug-and-play in the kernel and MESA (assuming the version is new enough), and you usually don’t need to download separate drivers.
Also, what kernel flags did you have to use?
It’s just that I’m a bit skeptical any of this is actually the fault of the AMD Linux kernel driver, and I would guess there’s some underlying software or hardware issue like a faulty ACPI implementation on the motherboard. I’m not saying AMD can do no wrong, but in this case, making blanket statements about the quality of AMD GPU drivers may be premature.
rx 6650 xt, stock drivers that come with arch, amdgpu. issue is both on lts and latest. seems to be a ring buffer error. there’s an open ticket about it.
I don’t remeber the flag, but it’s to disable some power saving feature.
That sounds more like something weird about the card itself than with the driver; “power saving feature” makes me think a faulty hardware ACPI implementation by the card vendor is to blame. I’ve had a similar thing happen with my Wi-Fi modem where it would completely crash and only a reboot would fix it; I too have to do special kernel options to get it working.
The author is Russian. That’s their culture after all.
I was a bit reluctant at first (pun intended)
I think this is the Reluctant Anarchist guy from YouTube? His writing style would match the way he talks in the videos.
