Never heard about pikaur before (Rua gang here), but judging by the screenshots, does it not allow you to review the PKGBUILD before building the package? Seems to me like the most basic feature a AUR helper has to have, since AUR is all user-contributed without reviews. Is pikaur really letting you install packages blindly like that?
Arch follows a rolling release model. It's inherently unstable, by design.
English has a specific word for that: reliable.
Pedantry aside, having a complex system filled with hundreds (thousands?) of software packages whose versions are constantly changing, and whose updates may have breaking changes and/or regressions, is a quick way of ending up with software that crashes or breaks through no fault of the user (save for the decision to use a rolling release distro).
Have you ever had to maintain a software project with many dependencies? If you have, then surely you have had the experience where picking up the project after a long period of inactivity makes updating dependencies much harder. Whereas an actively maintained or developed project, where dependencies are updated regularly, is much easier. You know what is changing and what is probably responsible if something breaks, etc. And it's much easier to revert.
Have you ever had situations where Foo has an urgent security or reliability update that you can't apply, because Bar only works with an earlier version of Foo, and updating or replacing Bar involves a significant amount of work because of breaking changes?
I won't deny that there's value in having the latest versions of software applications, especially for things like GPU drivers or compatibility layers like Proton where updates frequently have major performance or compatibility improvements.
But there's also value in having a stable base of software that you can depend on to be there when you wake up in the morning, and that has a dependable update schedule that you can plan around.
Arch devs know how much friction manual intervention updates cause, so they try to keep them to a minimum.
Honestly, I've had more problems running windows than running arch.
Worst thing with Windows isn't the occasional "wtf, how do I undo this change Microsoft forced upon me?" but more "Damn, it's that time of the month where Windows force me to do X", most recently being upgrades that you cannot shutdown or restart your computer without doing. Used to be you could run some command to avoid it, but literally all the hacks stopped working.
So now I'm slightly afraid of booting Windows which I do sometimes, because I don't want to end up in the situation where I need to boot Linux for five seconds to do something quickly, but Windows is refusing to do so without first doing a 20 minute upgrade. Fucking disrespectful of people's time!
Also, you can use a tool like snapper + btrfs-assistant (both of which come pre-installed on Cachy IIRC) which lets you fully revert your filesystem (snapper rollback) or partially (snapper undochange) if something breaks. Just make sure to use a btrfs filesystem for that.
https://discuss.cachyos.org/t/qt6-upgrade-to-6-10-1-breaks-s...
I've used Arch Linux (always with a nvidia GPU no less!) since 2017 sometime, moved over to CachyOS just this year, and had no issues that weren't caused by myself in all this time.
I initially moved away from Ubuntu at that time, as I got so tired of dist-upgrade breaking my system every single time I tried to upgrade, so figured I'll at least understand the breakages better when they happen with Arch. But I never got Arch to break something by itself, it always end up being my fault.
I was always able to recover with some insights from random forum or Reddit posts, but I can't say this was the type hacking I wanted to do.
I'm hoping a rolling release is easier in the long run, but we'll see. Also this time I used a separate SSD for /home so that at least I could do a full reinstall and still keep my data.