Never happened to me on Arch, on the other hand I had many kernel panics on macOS.
The thing with Arch updates is simply to follow the news section.
I guess it depends quite a bit on your hardware and experience. On Arch I can install anything I want in seconds, configure things exactly how I want, including whether I want a DE or a tilling VM etc. write services for anything using a very straightforward declarative syntax, (not XML or Apple Scipt), to wire up pretty much anything as a managed service or a cron, flying around the system.
On a Mac I constantly have to fight it not letting me do this or that or SIP preventing this other thing, you couldn't even snap windows for a long time, maybe you still can't - I installed some 3rd party, (again paid, of course) utility to do such a basic thing and it looks like Windows is going to beat it, (Unix-based OS), to an official package manager.
During those years I did all of that stuff. I used Xmonad and had a very large config. I did deep dives into both vim and emacs configuration.
When I got accepted into school, I realized that all had to change. I couldn't spend hours configuring things anymore. I had to focus on getting work done quickly. The Mac gives that to me with minimum fuss.
I think you are definitely not the target. The Mac is not designed for people to treat their own computer as a hobby, the way I did with Linux for a decade. It's designed for getting work done and being as seamless and unobtrusive as possible, for as many people as possible.
> When I got accepted into school, I realized that all had to change. I couldn't spend hours configuring things anymore. I had to focus on getting work done quickly.
I both started and sucesfully completed my CS degree on Arch. I didn't have to spend hours to configure anything. I now work as a full-time software dev on Arch every day, 8 hours a day. This is an often repeated myth but I haven't experienced it. Am not sure Linux, (any distro at this point), is the problem.
I guess it depends quite a bit on your hardware and experience. On Arch I can install anything I want in seconds, configure things exactly how I want, including whether I want a DE or a tilling VM etc. write services for anything using a very straightforward declarative syntax, (not XML or Apple Scipt), to wire up pretty much anything as a managed service or a cron, flying around the system.
On a Mac I constantly have to fight it not letting me do this or that or SIP preventing this other thing, you couldn't even snap windows for a long time, maybe you still can't - I installed some 3rd party, (again paid, of course) utility to do such a basic thing and it looks like Windows is going to beat it, (Unix-based OS), to an official package manager.
But I guess am not the target.