I'll have to agree there. The rolling release model can introduce problems if one upgrades to a broken upstream release. There's something else that does annoy me about a rolling release distro. But before that, going back to upgrades, there's however a few things to take in consideration, zacs:
- Upgrades are manual. One can (and should, because this is a do-yourself rolling release distro) only upgrade when they know everything is ok. Usually by listening to those who were eager to upgrade
- It's broken? Revert to the previous version. Pacman's cache allows you to do this with a single command.
- My critical packages are on my pacman.conf blacklist. This means they won't be in the list of available updates until I remove them from there. This allows me to control when and if I allow pacman to upgrade them. Since I also have been slowly increasing the number of packages I build from source, I actually have only a very limited set of packages under pacman's control. And I suppose that's how you are eventually meant to use Arch Linux.
Now... what does annoy me about the rolling release system is that, depending on the number of packages under pacman's control, this may mean you aren't entitled to any vacations. One month away from your computer may mean a string of upgrades longer than War & Peace.
All in all, I use Arch today mostly as a source-base distro. This is what I love most about it. The flexibility it gives me, once I feel comfortable around it, while still offering a fallback automatic update method for those few packages I don't care to manage myself. I could probably move to slackware now... or even better, just go to Lunar Linux. It's just that I got so used to Arch that I suppose, only if something really bad happens to this distro, will I consider changing. I'm, after all, very strongly, a man of habits. My Windows wallpaper is the same for the past 4 years.