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[WaffleEggnog]

I've started playing after a long time of inactivity and I'm trying to dig a basic hole in the wall to live in and the cavern keeps collapsing and killing people for absolutely no reason and I have no idea what to do. Help me out. Are physics different now?

[Reelya]

Where are you digging, exactly? I seem to recall people talking about how trees can collapse sometimes when you dig. It was a while ago and I thought it was a bug that was fixed. Trees might also grow up through cavern roofs though I'm not sure about the details.

[PatrikLundell]

Collapses happen when you remove the support of something (or build something that's not supported, such as a floor out from a bridge, with nothing to support it on the other edges, since bridges do not provide support).
A tile is supported if it is connected to another supported tile above, below, or perpendicularly to the sides (NOT diagonally). Tiles do not support each other (i.e. A supported by B supported by A), but have to have an unbroken support chain.
The most common digging cave-in mishap is probably trying to remove a floor above an open space, since it's very easy to accidentally dig away the supporting tiles to the sides of a tile (in particular a corner out into open space). Blanket designating the floor for channeling will probably result in cave-ins, for instance.
In all of these sensitive situations you'll want to micro manage your miners to ensure tiles are dug away in a safe order. Note that digging priorities will not do the job safely if you have more than one miner, since the priority controls the order in which the jobs are taken, not the order in which they are performed (travel distances will differ).

As Reelya said, a blanket "if fails all the time" description provides very little info on which to give advice.

[Deboche]

It could be that you're using the first z-level below the surface. That makes a floor over your dwarves' heads which will collapse if you cut a tree and a log falls on it.