I’m thinking of choosing Debian instead. I’m a student, low on budget, and wanna play with linux and laptops, and I think Arch or Cachy OS need updates or distro upgrades(?) weekly or something?
Solved: up to date Arch can last for 2 decades on my cheap laptop, and use Flatpak for older versions of software.
Same thing stands. I run Arch daily on a 10 year old mid-range laptop, and I used to run it on a 20 year old core 2 duo laptop.
It won’t become noticeably slower with time, that’s a Windows and MacOS thing.
Arch will update all your software to the latest version, but it will still not add anything. Updating your software can even make it faster. Of course, things like web browsers will get slower the more stuff they add, but that will be the same in any Linux distro or OS.
You can also just not update, it won’t suddenly stop working. I still recommend updating for the security patches, but if you won’t connect the machine to the internet, it’s perfectly fine to not update it.
I can see it, latest distro is still small, but do you have the choice between older and newer software? Are there compatibility issues with Arch’s nonstop updates?
The Arch repos only host the latest version of a package, so usually you can’t install older versions of a software. There are some exceptions (like with PHP or Python, where you may require a specific version of the framework), but there’s not that many of them. You’ll see that it’s usually not a problem, as it’s still recommended to run the latest version of every software, for the security patches.
If you update your system constantly, there shouldn’t be any compatibility issues with the updates. The official repos are carefully managed so that, at any given point, every package works with every other package. If a common library is updated, all the packages that depend on it are recompiled and updated to use the newer version.
If you stop updating your system, everything that you already have installed will keep working as it was.
For a while, installing new apps without updating will work flawlessly. But after a while, the new apps will start becoming incompatible with your system, due to outdated libraries and missing dependencies. In that case, you’ll need to update the system so that everything is up to date again and it works. The package manager will prevent you from messing things up, so don’t worry that much about it.
Arch is a rolling release, so it’s designed to be constantly updated. That’s the way I recommend people use it, especially if they’re new to the distro. But if you don’t inatall new software, it’s also perfectly stable without updating (and you can also install new software without necessarily updating everything, if you know what you’re doing).