Sigh, not seeing the forest…

Fair enough, I would rather take a laptop that properly wakes from suspend to ram every time (never seen that work reliably on Ubuntu or Debian, it is 99.9% reliable on Arch). I guess it all depends on what stability metrics you care about.

And even on Arch most updates don't "upend the world". Yes, sometimes they do (KDE 6), but that is rare, because upstream doesn't release such major releases very often. I guess the question then is, do you want those 3-4 times per year (and only small and partial to specific subsystems) or do you want to accumulate a bunch and get them all in one go.

Really though, I can't think of any major update in the last year except for KDE 6. Yes, there been 2-3 updates where I hit minor bugs after updates too (quickly reported and quickly fixed, and none of the a showstopper), and one where I got a fairly annoying bug (Bluetooth defaulted to off in the login manager, easy to fix in the config file once I figured that out, and on a laptop it is an inconvenience not a show stopper).