Does the 1~2 week delay improve Manjaro stability over Arch?
I run Manjaro on the computer I use 99.9% of the time. It’s been rock stable but there have been a few issues, over the years. I’ve been forced to reinstall on four occasions, since 2017. I expect it would have been more but I stopped taking updates until a week or two after they are offered. Every issue could have been handled with timeshift but I only started running timeshift about 6 months ago.
I also have an Arch laptop that I use a few times per year. It’s been very stable but it goes for weeks without being used. I have no way to know how many problems it would have had if I used it every day.
Any thoughts on which is more stable? Maybe it doesn’t matter that much, with snappy and timeshift?
No, because the whole Manjaro concept is bullshit.
Delaying updates by two weeks for a few more checks could help catch some bugs that went unnoticed, but not in the way Manjaro does it. Which means with no rhyme or reason at all. They don’t use the two weeks for additional tests. They don’t even collect fixes or patches based on the bleeding edge experience of actual Arch to apply to their delayed updates. They just delay updates, fixes and everything by two weeks. So your system is exactly as unstable as Arch just with 2 weeks delay.
And it gets worse from there: Arch has a disclaimer about the AUR being unsupported and requires you to install AUR helpers manually, so you did it at least once the old-school way and actually see the disclaimer. Manjaro however gives you access to the AUR pre-installed. No, not a cloned version of the AUR that is also 2 weeks behind. Direct access to one as used by Arch that expects your system to be up-to-date, not 2 weeks behind… introducing a completely new kind of dependency hell and instability.
PS: And that’s before questionable stuff on the Manjaro side… like letting their SSL certificates expire multiple times (and suggesting changing your devices clock as a “fix”) or DDOS’ing the AUR with a bug in their AUR helper, also multiple times.
The delayed updates also include security updates by the way, so you’re vulnerable for two weeks to any known exploit.