Arch really scared me away from running rolling release distros. Services suddenly changing configuration formats leading to failure to start at boot. Breaking package changes that was my fault since I didn't keep up with the forums.
I did have one breaking change with tumbleweed, but then it warmed me and wouldn't let me proceed with the update until I had acknowledged that I would have to fix my openvpn (I think it was) config.
That's explicitly part of the contract between users and maintainers you accept when running Arch and it has nothing to do with it being a rolling release. Many other rolling releases like Debian or OpenSUSE set completely different expectations to their users.
I have a laptop that is running an Arch install that was first installed in 2011. It runs great. It has, to my memory, twice required manual intervention. (to be fair, it once required manual intervention when I moved the hard drive into an entirely new chassis, and once again when I migrated it from 32bit to 64bit, so 4 times total.)
And I have several other arch boxes that are less old but have had no trouble.
In fact, the distro that's given me the most trouble has been Fedora, but at least when its upgrades fail they now just roll back and make you try again...
Arch really wants you to keep up to date. Run those - Syu's. Often. Never more than a week. If you let it sit for months and months that's when things can get hairy.
This means irrespective of you having only updates for 100 packages, it will update all your 1500 packages (Or the number of packages that you have installed on the system).
Can someone confirm this? Because if this is true, that is such a waste.
In Alpine for example, the maintainers only bump rdepends when they think those need to be rebuilt, which sometimes leads to them underestimating and those unupdated rdepends end up breaking. TW avoids that but at the cost of a lot of "pointless" updates.
