I don't buy that at all. If a serious distro pushed an update that broke X, we'd have all heard about it. Which distro? What package was it that broke? Are you sure you weren't mucking about with non-distro stuff like the NVidia driver installer?

Ubuntu, and nope.

The last time my X broke was a couple years back. Ubuntu pushed a defective update. Before that, the last time something like that happened was when I was using Debian Sid.

Breaking X is something you expect with Sid. And if you are running it, you re supposed to be able to fix it and submit a patch.

If you are breaking X, you are doing something wrong.

I think it probably depends on the distro, I've had quite a few systems break on Arch because I didn't read update warnings on the Arch Linux website after they had pushed a bad update.

Tangentially that is why I moved to xubuntu from Arch, though I'm sure Arch is a bit nicer with regards to headaches now.

Fedora likes to break frequently though I don't know if packages as big as X are likely to fall through the cracks.

Both Arch and, to a lesser extent, Fedora are aimed at more advanced users who want faster updates and newer technology over stability.

I think this is a great compromise, but it does mean you may have some issues with updates. That said, I have not had any issues on Fedora that weren't my doing.

I've been using Fedora for about a year. Earlier, I used OS X for about the same amount of time and I did have problems that weren't entirely my fault, largely with Java and Eclipse. Since all I was doing during that time was simple Java development for school, there just wasn't anything else that could have gone wrong.