I guess when I mentioned “risk of breakage” w/regards to Arch Linux I was correct. After few days monitoring the chat channel and forums, I can easily see that the whole “rolling release” thing does indeed cause things to stop working on a semi-regular basis. At least, it’s a fair number folks who have had that happen to them that are in these channels/forums asking for help.
But it’s not really a big deal. I’m running Arch Linux on my laptop for fun. It’s not my main system. So I don’t really care that much if it breaks. If it gets too bad I can just pop in my SSD with Windows 8 on it and I’ll be cruising along again.
One of the things I like about my new Arch install, is that it boots to a command line. It does not auto-start the GUI. That can be nice for when I’m working with the system via SSH terminal (which is most of the time). That is partly due to the fact that much of the help that can be found on the Arch website walks you through configuration steps using command-line tools. So the GUI is not that necessary. So I will SSH in to configure things, update the system, or run IRC. And it is pretty nice to have a well-configured and functioning Linux system handy.