I have often heard from non-arch users that they perceive arch as too unstable to be used as a daily driver, but as a long time arch user (~8yrs) I have never experienced any disruptive events.
I can imagine problems arising when using certain hardware and drivers, but then you would like experience problems on other distributions from time to time as well.
I've been using arch for the past several years. Decided to get it installed after buying a new desktop. Overall it's good (and I've used it before), I have very simple setup and I don't really need much. Just dev tools.
The issue I'm having is (I think) hardware related. I'm a bit afraid to update systemd since by doing it several times before I got a kernel crash during install which left the system in an odd place. requiring me to boot up from usb to correct the installation. I can deal with it, but this is not something I particularly enjoy. I currently have almost 2GB of pending updates because of this, which I think defeats the purpose of rolling release distro.
I was actually thinking about trying out some other distros, maybe debian. With hopes that it will fix the kernel crashes. Another thought that I had, was to switch to FreeBSD, the only thing currently preventing me is the lack of Docker.
If you're risk aware of updates, you might want to try something like nixos where you can always rollback the entire state of the OS at boot time. So upgrades are basically creating a new snapshot with the upgrades, then reboot to check if everything is working. If everything is working, delete old snapshot. If things are not working, reboot to previous state. Makes the risks very small for even the most destructive upgrades.
I myself use Arch, so don't have anything against it obviously, but many can't deal with the API breakage that happens sometimes when packages are always on the latest version. I barely write any software that uses the package managers libraries, so don't get hit by this, but some friends of mine complained about this when using arch, coming from debian/ubuntu.
Sometimes pacman upgrades also spits out manual commands for you to follow after an upgrade, while I never had that happen on Ubuntu (using it for my laptop), guess that could be a turnoff for some too.
Lol Ive used Arch as a driver for about 9 years now. No problems. Meanwhile, I constantly get asked questions about how to unbreak colleague/friend Ubuntu setups because they broke things try to get a slightly more recent version of X package.
Rolling does not imply non-stable. Stability is the sum of many factors and to me, consistent packaging is key to that. Ubuntu and other distros that package software unconventionally is a maintenance headache for the original software authors and the enduser both. I frankly don’t understand why anyone would use it as a desktop driver.
Arch is stable not "Stable". I had less problems with Arch then with Ubuntu, so it is stable operating system. There is a separate "testing" repository [1].
I can imagine problems arising when using certain hardware and drivers, but then you would like experience problems on other distributions from time to time as well.