I’ve been using Arch for over 15 years, and honestly, I never check the news before updating. Once in a while, I’ll get an error — maybe once a year — and the fix is always just running a quick command I find on the Arch site or the package page. Takes seconds, no drama.

I’ve only managed to break my system twice, and both times were 100% my fault. Even then, recovery was easy: just chroot in and run one command.

As for updates, doing them regularly (daily, weekly, or monthly) is recommended. No need to go crazy with updates. Too frequent updates are actually discouraged. Arch is a rolling release, so your packages and dependencies get updated together — meaning things don’t randomly break. Skipping updates won’t nuke your system either, and if something ever goes sideways, you can just downgrade and be back up in no time.

One time I did not update an arch system for something like 6 months... You can't immagine the troubles I needed to go through to get it into a working state.

I would also add that it heavily depends on the setup a user is running. I had been running Arch with XFCE and dwm for years on a machine with a Nvidia card and I can count the number of issues I had which were not induced by my wrong-doing with three fingers. When I switched to Plasma Wayland on my new machine I faced more issues in one and a half years than with my old setup. Also, none of these issues were mentioned on the news section but were due to Plasma updates. There are just too many moving parts under heavy development with such a big DE and Wayland is also not quite 100% there yet, so for some people it can seem like Arch is rather unstable although it still is a heavy generalisation.

To be fair, you don't need to update your system to install a package, all you need to do is run the update command just to sync up the database, then cancel out when prompted.

I've gone multiple weeks/months without updating and everything was fine.

I hardly ever read the news and I update like once every one to two weeks, and I'm not sure I've ever had a system breaking bug introduced by an update. I've had small bugs that break UI stuff but nothing that really impairs my ability to use the computer.

I have run into all sorts of weird issues trying to run games or programs not packaged to run on Arch but those are usually solvable with tinkering and some outside advice.

Arch has just never really felt inherently unstable to me, IMO. If you have patience for tinkering and customizing Arch is a great distro that gives you a ton of control over your system + has a fantastic body of documentation.