Sooner or later, rolling releases especially arch-based fuck something up from my experience :D The good thing though is, that all the time that you're using the distro you have latest and greatest stuff.

This isn't an answer to the question, but back when I was using openSUSE Tumbleweed I ran into no problems whatsoever with updates etc. I eventually switched only because I found nvidia proprietary drivers easier to manage on Fedora -- thanks to negativo17's great repo.

In any case I think it's worth trying out Tumbleweed alongside Arch-derivatives on KVM or Virtualbox or whatever before deciding which one you want to use.

I'm using Arch since almost 8 years by now and run an update

pacman -Syu

almost every day and never had a severe problem to date.

Say 1-2 times a year on average, I hit some packaging inconsistency that's typically quickly sorted out by the community.

It has been a fantastic ride so far, seriously.

Ubuntu can't protect you from bad updates either. I had my system screwed up a couple of times by Nvidia drivers.

Long time Arch user also, with no issues except 1 time when i forcefully removed binutils package myself,it even screamed on the screen that its not a good idea and do i really want to do that :)... anyway.. i have cron job that makes full system drive backup image every week, so if anything goes really wrong, its easy to just restore it.

worth a note, last 4 years i also have testing repos enabled, so i would call it pretty stable even with testing repositories. no issues.

xpander@archlinux ~ $ cat /var/log/pacman.log | grep -a filesystem
[2013-01-21 17:45] installed filesystem (2012.12-1)
[2013-01-21 17:45]   -> Running build hook: [filesystems]

3 years and a half with my current installation of Manjaro, and so far it's great!
I have rarely some issues, as long as you check the forum/update changelog if there will some things to do you're pretty safe.
When I have issues with upgrade it's mainly my fault.

Maybe Manjaro is not perfect, but soon as you try a rolling release you never want to go back IMO.
And don't forget the AUR (Arch User Repository) in all Arch based, it's a great thing!

I've used Arch Linux for a few years. I think the maintainers do a good job of selecting only released quality software, so the distro itself doesn't really have stability issues.

However I think users of Arch Linux tend to like going under the hood of their systems, which is why they would prefer a minimalist, rolling release distro. The Arch Linux wiki provides a lot of information on how to customize the system, and Arch's installation process asks you to edit configuration files and run commands directly (Arch-based distros might provide graphical installers though). When you tinker without following the instructions correctly, it can easily break your system. There have been a few times when I made my computer fail to boot, but I've been able to recover from them with help from the IRC channel, and learned a lot in the process.

For gaming specifically, note that many games only officially support Ubuntu or other Debian derived distros. So gaming on Arch Linux may require extra knowledge to fix issues like missing library versions.

Quoting: hagabakaThe Arch Linux wiki provides a lot of information on how to customize the system, and Arch's installation process asks you to edit configuration files and run commands directly (Arch-based distros might provide graphical installers though). When you tinker without following the instructions correctly, it can easily break your system.

I've read the Arch and Manjaro Wikis and follow Manjaro's forums and came up with the following terminal commands for a good update/maintenance:

Update system
sudo pacman-mirrors --fasttrack 6 && sudo pacman -Syyu

Check for orphaned packages
sudo pacman -Qdt

Remove orphaned packages
sudo pacman -Rns $(pacman -Qdtq)

Check for foreign packages
sudo pacman -Qm

Install packages
sudo pacman -Syu package_name

Uninstall packages
sudo pacman -Rns package_name

Clean package cache
sudo paccache -r

Old configuration files
     ~/.config/ -- where apps stores their configuration
    ~/.cache/ -- cache of some programs may grow in size
    ~/.local/share/ -- old files may be lying there

What do you think?

Have you come across the 'Rosetta' (after the 'Rosetta Stone') as well? It's a pretty thorough table of correspondence across package management commands in various distros: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman/Rosetta

Quoting: wvstolzingHave you come across the 'Rosetta' (after the 'Rosetta Stone')

Didn't know that one, thanks.