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I've used Arch for about a year and agree that the need to attend carefully to updates is annoying. There was a particularly egregious case of this recently wit

I've used Arch for about a year and agree that the need to attend carefully to updates is annoying. There was a particularly egregious case of this recently with PAM, where if you did not update a certain file following the instructions given by the pacman messages (or just missed it), then you wouldn't be able to log in. I also had another instance of not being able to boot into Arch due to a bug in the package governing my encrypted drive. In both cases it was simple to solve by booting from a rescue USB and changing the appropriate files (downgrading in the second case), but it was still obnoxious. However, as far as I can tell, it should not be a problem to wait 6 months (or even years?) to update. There are periodic reddit threads where someone updates a years-old Arch installation just fine.

SnowProblem 6y ago
That PAM issue last month cost me ~8 hours (5 to drive home, long story). Nevertheless, it was the first time in about 2 years that I'd run into this kind of pain with Arch. Mostly the OS has been rock solid and out of the way, and I enjoy being able to dive deep when needed. I'd given linux a try every few years since 2001. Arch was the first distro that stuck for me. It's like the OS equivalent of writing a library from scratch vs plugging into someone else's framework. It's hard to imagine going back at this point.