Hi all, Relatively long time Linux user (2017 to be precise), and about two 3rds of that time has been on Arch and its derivatives. Been running Endeavour OS for at least 2.5 years now. It’s a solid distro until it’s not. I’d go for months without a single issue then an update comes out of nowhere and just ruins everything to either no return, or just causes me to chase after a fix for hours, and sometimes days. I’m kinda getting tired of this trend of sudden and uncalled for issues. It’s like a hammer drops on you without you seeing it. I wish they were smaller issues, no, they’re always major. Most of the time I’d just reinstall, and I hate that. It’s so much work for me. I set things the way I like them and then they’re ruined, and the hunt begins. I have been wanting to switch for a long time, and I honestly have even been looking into some of those immutable distros (that’s how much I don’t want to be fixing my system. I’m tired, I just want to use my system to get work done). I was also told that Nobara is really good (is it? Never tried it). My only hold back — and it’s probably silly to some of you— is the AUR. I love it. It’s the most convenient thing ever, and possibly the main reason why I have stuck with Arch and its kids. Everything is there. So, what do y’all recommend? I was once told by some kind soul to use an immutable distro and setup “distrobox” on it if I wanted the AUR. I’ve never tried this “distrobox” thing (I can research it, no problem). I also game here and there and would like to squeeze as much performance as I can out of my PC (all AMD, BTW, and I only play single player games). So, I don’t know what to do. I need y’all’s suggestions, please. I’ll aggregate all of the suggestions and go through them and (hopefully) come up with something good for my sanity. Please suggest anything you think fits my situation. I don’t care, I will 100% appreciate every single suggestion and look into it. I’m planning to take it slow on the switch, and do a lot of research before switching. Unless my system shits the bed more than now then I don’t know. I currently can’t upgrade my system, as I wouldn’t be able to log in after the update. It just fails to log in. I had to restore a 10 days old snapshot to be able to get back into my damn desktop. I have already copied my whole home directory into another drive I have on my PC, so if shit hits the fan, I’ll at least have my data. Help a tired brother out, please <3. Thank you so much in advance.
Basically every distro is based on either arch or debian (some exceptions). I’ve been perfectly happy with debian, even as a gamer.
Debian. I’ve had installations which went trough several major version upgrades, I’ve worked with ‘set and forget’ setups where someone originally installed Debian and I get my hands on it 3-5 years later to upgrade it and it just works. Sure, it might not be as fancy as some alternatives and some things may need manual tweaking here and there, but the thing just works and even on rare occasion something breaks you’ll still have options to fix it assuming you’re comfortable with plain old terminal.
I was actually thinking of that. How’s testing and unstable, are they good, too?
They are excactly what the name implies. Testing is generally pretty good, but it’s still testing. And unstable is also what the name implies. People, myself included back in the day, run both as daily drivers, but if you want rock stable distribution installing unstable revision might not be the best choise.
I’ve been distro hopping for years. After each time trying a few distros, I always find myself coming back to Linux Mint (cinnamon desktop environment). It has everything I need, and just works beautifully out of the box. It might not be flashy or have the latest cutting edge features, but it’s stable.
I’m currently running the Debian edition of Mint (LMDE), and wishing I was back on standard Mint. Nothing major, but a few minor persistent issues that never happened on Mint.
I did try NixOS (immutable OS), but it didn’t seem to have support for all the apps I wanted. I gave up fairly quickly, so you’ll probably have more success.
I want to use mint, but they don’t have plasma. I know I can install it, but I’m not sure about the support and updates and all that.
Installing Plasma should be as simple as “apt install kde-plasma-desktop”, then log out and select plasma from the login screen. I’ve tried other DEs but not Plasma, so I can’t say for certain it will work.
You can always try distros in a VM almost completely risk free. It won’t tell you everything, but it’s an easy way to get first impressions without losing your main OS.
Edit: This forum thread says you can install and use Plasma, but it’s not a great experience. Mint will probably not be the right option for you then.
Linux Mint. As an alternative: any kind of BSD is going to be pretty stable.
Mint. It’s not sexy. But it always just works. Never had an update break anything. I’ve got an Nvidia card, which ppl said was notorious for not working with Linux, it just works. The installer just reached out and grabbed the appropriate drivers, so easy. Have yet to have a steam game not work.
10/10 would recommend for anyone.
Can plasma work no problem on it? I can’t do any other DE but that one
First to answer your main question if I were you I would try NixOS, because it’s declarative so it’s essentially impossible to break, i.e. if it breaks for whatever reason a fresh reinstall will get you back to exactly where you were.
That being said, I know it’s anecdotal but I have been using Arch for (holy crap) 15 years, and I’ve never experienced an update breaking my system. I find that most of the time people complain about Arch breaking with an update they’re either not using Arch (but Manjaro, Endeavor, etc) and rely heavily on AUR which one should specifically not do, much less on Arch derivatives. The AUR is great, but there’s a reason those packages are not on the main repos, don’t use any system critical stuff from them and you should be golden. Also try to figure out why stuff broke when it did, you’ll learn a lot about what you’re doing wrong on your setup because most people would have just updated without any issues. Otherwise it really doesn’t matter which distro you choose, mangling a distro with manual installations to the point where an upgrade breaks them can be done on most of them, and going for a fully immutable one will be very annoying if you’re so interested in poking at the system.
I used Fedora, and am now leaving for the exact reason you’re leaving Arch (plus IMO bad repos). Switched to openSUSE Tumbleweed a few months ago and am having a much better experience than with Fedora :D; I use the PC for programming, audio recording and mixing, document stuff, etc. (No gaming though).
Nobara is good but does break regularly, FYI… If you’re a “power-user” I wouldn’t recommend it as a daily driver.
There’s also Void Linux, which hasn’t ever broken on me due to an update, but is still a lot of work, due to its nature. It’s actually quite stable though, and you might enjoy it, since it’s quite similar to Arch and has very large repos.
I can’t say much about immutable distros, as the only one I’ve used is bazzite, which was kinda horrible (broke constantly).
Well, I hope that helped. Good luck!
Wow, what a wall of text. I’m sorry but I’m sure I skimmed some parts.
Look. The bulk of the replies you’re going to get will be like “this is my favourite distro and here’s how it works for you” not “this is the best distro for your criteria.” It’s important to understand the deep level of bias you’re going to get.
But your cause is a noble one. I use a particular style of distro because it can be trusted to install well, back out well, do both safely, and allow validation at every stage. I think it’s a good candidate, and it’s already been mentioned as a really great ‘set it and forget it’ distro.
Good luck.
And what distro might that be?
i’m trying out Aeon at the moment. it’s from the opensuse people.
it auto-updates, it snapshots itself so any failed update will just silently revert, and it does flatpaks or distrobox only.
if you’re okay with gnome, try it.
I’ve read the whole documentation page. It sounds really good, but still has some issues that I might not like. I’m going to install it in a vm and see. Also, kalpa is still in alpha stage and I’m not a gnome person.
I stopped using Arch a long time ago for this same reason. Either Fedora (or derivatives like Nobara) or an atomic/immutable distro (like Bazzite, Silverblue, Kinoite) is probably the way to go.
I used to feel like Ubuntu was a good option for this, but it no longer is: too often they try to push undesirable changes that need manual tweaking to fix after release upgrades. Debian Stable is generally good for low-maintenance use but doesn’t keep up as well with newer hardware or newer updates to video drivers and mesa, which makes it suboptimal for typical gaming use. Debian Testing can be prone to break things in updates (in my experience, worse than Arch does).
I saw another comment recommend Rocky/RHEL, but note that their kernel doesn’t support btrfs. Since you mentioned a root snapshot, I expect you probably use it.
Look. I’ve been there. I started my Linux journey with Arch based distros, then distrohopped a lot, and finally found the best for me, and what I personally consider the best either for normal users or those that don’t want to do any maintenance.
It’s the Universal Blue family of distros: Bazzite (gaming / KDE / gnome) Aurora (standard / development / KDE) Bluefin (standard / development / gnome)
Set it and forget about it. It just freaking works. For GUI apps install from the Discover app store (which uses Flatpak), for cli apps use Homebrew (brew install whatever). If you can’t find something, open Distrobox (already included) create an Arch container, install whatever you want from the AUR, and use it like you’re used to. It works like freaking magic.
If somehow you manage to brick your installation, when you reboot you’ll be able to boot to a past snapshot.
You just can’t fail with this. It’s the best of the best IMHO.
You absolutely can fail. I daily drive bazzite but many things have been pretty rough:
Any coding apps that will use an external device -> you can’t use flatpak. You have to use distrobox that constantly freezes your entire mouse for 3-5 seconds upon any sort of dialog, settings, saving, anything where it has to access the filesystem. Then you have to add udev rules to directories that in the documentation says not to write to, and reloading the rules doesn’t work for testing, you have to fully restart with every minor change or it will seem like the change didn’t work.
Luckily most device drivers seem to work in the provided arch distrobox but holy dependency hell. Things will fail to install because they need a package that exists on the host but not the container so you get an unsolvable “file exists” conflict. When installing a package, it will sometimes just try to grab an old version of a dependency specifically that will 404 out instead of just grabbing the most recent version (never happened on arch itself to me)
Setting up a plasma vault with gocryptfs was not fun figuring out how. Also ran into tons of dependency problems and the fact that fedora just abandoned it specifically. Ended up just having to stick the binary in a random folder and point to it.
Any sort of document authentication/signing -> doesn’t work and will not work in the future for a long time.
You absolutely have to install rpms still for corectrl, any external devices, like drawing tablets, etc…
Some games inexplicably use <50% GPU and <40% CPU with terrible framerates and will not go any higher (or lower) no matter what, switching between low and high settings and resolution results in 0fps change.
When I have my config set and don’t have to change anything, it is super super nice to never have to manually update, but anything outside of very basic usage is weaving through nonstandard undocumented territory.
Bazzite trades maintenance headaches for configuration and installation headaches. For me, that is worth it.
Look, this is the reason people pay RedHat money. Go install Rocky Linux, turn on all the automatic updates and ignore it for the next five years.
On the enthusiast side, NixOS seems to be working fine if you want newer versions of software or larger repos.
NixOS is great if you’re ready to learn Nix, which is an undertaking
My favorite distros are Gentoo and Debian.
I can say with confidence that Linux Mint is what you’re looking for.
Fedora Workstation has been really good in my experience. The available software is shockingly up to date and I haven’t run into much breakage of any kind in the year or so I’ve been using it across 2 systems (despite my best efforts every few months when the urge to tinker hits me). I do occasionally run into issues caused by the default SELinux policies, but they’re not especially difficult to work around if you’re comfortable using the terminal.
I do share your sentiment about the AUR - I definitely miss it at times. That said, Flatpaks and the fact that pre-built RPMs are so commonplace have both softened the blow a lot.
Came from Arch and OpenSuse. Fedora has been such a great switch. As I’ve gotten older and became a dad, my computer time at home is limited and I don’t have endless evenings to troubleshoot shit. Fedora has been stable for me for the last 4 years. I use the KDE spin.
Thank you. I’ve run Fedora for a long while, too. Albeit, it was a while ago (not sure how good it is now), but I’ve never had any luck with its kde version. It was always broken (for me at least). Also, hunting for apps was kind of a big issue. Then come copr repos. But I guess we have a good case with flatpaks now. Even thought I couldn’t use them before due to storage constraints, but now, that’s not an issue. So, I’ll keep Fedora in mind. I appreciate you
It’s currently the most simple to use and “just works” option.
I came from Arch to Fedora as well but using Universal Blue’s images. In my case, Aurora (KDE), and daughter’s Bluefin (Gnome). They update in the background and only install when you reboot. So far, most of the newer software releases such as web browsers or the desktop environment fall within a day or two for being installed which is a nice alternative. The big plus I see on these too is they are immutable so if something installs or breaks, you just boot into the previous version from Grub and go from there.
Additionally, OpenSuse MicroOS has options for whatever environment you are used to such as Gnome or KDE, this is immutable as well. I view all of these as “Set and Forget”.
I didnt even remember which os I had until I read this and remembered it was aurora
