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I think the important thing to remember when running arch is that you are always running -current so things are prone to occasional breakage. That said, I can count the number of times something broke badly over the past two years on one hand. The main cause of "breakage" is not keeping abreast of changes which require the user to update configs or similar. These issues are nearly always posted on the main page and have at least one thread going in the forums before they are moved out of testing, and the output of pacman always includes warnings/news about changes. Afterwards, of course, the forums are packed with posts. Arch is not a distro you should run if you are not willing to keep your ear to the ground (or read package manager output).
Things do really break from time to time, but they are almost always fixed very quickly.




Member since:
2005-07-06
Beyond the release, there is an official public developer mailing list and a Pacman project page. The only thing I think Arch mostly lack of is a QA team or QA process, though the stability is improving much (comparing to its bleeding edge policy, stability is indeed great) and quick fix from devs is very impressive.
Salute to Arch's great dev team and community.