Arch is aimed at people who know their shit so they can build their own distro based on how they imagine their distro to be. It is not a good distro for beginners and non power users, no matter how often you try to make your own repository, and how many GUI installers you make for it. There’s a good reason why there is no GUI installer in arch (aside from being able to load it into ram). That being that to use Arch, you need to have a basic understanding of the terminal. It is in no way hard to boot arch and type in archinstall. However, if you don’t even know how to do that, your experience in whatever distro, no matter how arch based it is or not, will only last until you have a dependency error or some utter and total Arch bullshit® happens on your system and you have to run to the forums because you don’t understand how a wiki works.
You want a bleeding edge distro? Use goddamn Opensuse Tumbleweed for all I care, it is on par with arch, and it has none of the arch stuff.
You have this one package that is only available on arch repos? Use goddamn flatpak and stop crying about flatpak being bloated, you probably don’t even know what bloat means if you can’t set up arch. And no, it dosent run worse. Those 0,0001 seconds don’t matter.
You really want arch so you can be cool? Read the goddamn 50 page install guide and set it up, then we’ll talk about those arch forks.
(Also, most arch forks that don’t use arch repos break the aur, so you don’t even have the one thing you want from arch)
No, you’re still not understanding, say libX current version is 1.2.3 and we have two distros A (a stable distro) and B (an unstable distro). libX now releases 2.0.0, A remains on 1.2.3 B moves to 2.0.0. libX now releases 1.2.4 which despite being just a patch breaks everything. A update and breaks, B does not.
Stable just means stable API, it says nothing about system breakage. System breakage can happen regardless of stable API, and it’s up to distro managers to not release a package that breaks their diatro, and the Arch ones are excellent at their job. An update breaking Arch is as likely to happen as on Ubuntu, but an upgrade on Arch can break other stuff which on Ubuntu can only happen when doing a version upgrade.
Ok, so arch doesn’t break because it’s unstable, it just breaks anyways. And it doesn’t break more in general, it just breaks worse more often. Got it.
I’ll still stay away from the bleeding edge.
If you want to talk about breakage we can, as long as you understand that’s not what people mean when they say stable. About breakages Arch doesn’t break that often, or at all, I can’t recall a single time my system broke for an update or for something that was not entirely my fault.