I haven't tried not touching it for years to be honest. Longest period without a reboot was something between half a year and a year and it worked without a problem. Check the Arch website, breaking changes or manual interventions are very rare nowadays. There's just one thing you have to do if you start an update after a long time: make sure to update the keyring first or pacman will exit with an error. That's also mentioned in the wiki.
I installed Arch on my server because:
I know it very well.
The base system is tiny. Fewer packages = fewer problems. Everything else is in Podman containers anyway.
It's very flexible. I have a customized encrypted rootfs which needs to be unlocked through SSH, not a very common thing I guess.
No, you need to do system maintenance on Arch at least once a year if you don't do it after each update. You need to merge configs (I love etc-upgrade from gentoo for this) and find and delete orphaned packages left behind by the rolling release that are still on your system.
I have also had issues with Ubuntu. I just stick with Debian because I don't have to touch it for years.
Can you do the same with Arch? Also why do you need newer packages on a server? (I'm taking about the VPS)
I haven't tried not touching it for years to be honest. Longest period without a reboot was something between half a year and a year and it worked without a problem. Check the Arch website, breaking changes or manual interventions are very rare nowadays. There's just one thing you have to do if you start an update after a long time: make sure to update the keyring first or pacman will exit with an error. That's also mentioned in the wiki.
I installed Arch on my server because:
No, you need to do system maintenance on Arch at least once a year if you don't do it after each update. You need to merge configs (I love etc-upgrade from gentoo for this) and find and delete orphaned packages left behind by the rolling release that are still on your system.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance