So, few days ago I asked the thread which distro they’d recommend and one of the most recommended was debian and debian based. But I for myself(Even though the post says otherwise) now chose to use an arch based distro, because of the better supported and newer nvidia drivers as well as automatic hardware detection. So I wanted to hear some experiences of you, that you may have had in the past considering EndeavourOS, CachyOS, Manjaro and Arch itself. I personally have gone for Manjaro now, kind of hoping that it won’t break on the attempt to cut themselves of the company side of Manjaro and becomming they’re own non-profit.
Greetings, Konke
I personally have gone for Manjaro
Why would anyone intentionally do that?
The whole Manjaro concept of delaying Arch updates by two weeks is bullshit, because they don’t actually use that time for additional tests or include fixes. They just ship exactly the same bugs 2 weeks later.
On top of this where Arch explicitly warns users about the AUR as unvetted community content and only lets you install AUR helpers manually (increasing the chance that people see the warning and think twice) Manjaro comes with their own AUR helper pre-installed. No warning, no nothing. Oh, and they use the unmodified AUR which is running under the assumption that you have an updated Arch system, not one weeks out-of-date. So welcome to breakages and dependency hell.
Said Manjaro-specific AUR helper also has ddos’ed the AUR on multiple occasions because they don’t seem to believe in testing.
Have I mentioned the –by now meme-worthy– fact that they are too stupid to not let their SSL certificates expire and unironically proposed setting your PC’s clock/date back as a solution?
Which distro would you recommend?
CachyOS, EndeavourOS or plain arch.
most recommended was debian and debian based. But I for myself(Even though the post says otherwise) now chose to use an arch based distro
Why are you asking our opinion on the matter since you clearly have made up your mind already?
because of the better supported and newer nvidia drivers
Newer doesn’t necessarily mean better, there’s a reason other d’Ístria delay packages and it has to do with compatibility and finding early bugs.
as well as automatic hardware detection.
What? Debian based distros have automatic hardware detection, Arch expects you to know your hardware and install things accordingly. Hell, almost nothing in Arch is automatic.
So I wanted to hear some experiences of you, that you may have had in the past considering EndeavourOS, CachyOS, Manjaro and Arch itself.
I used Arch as my main distro for over 15 years, it’s a great distro it has a lot of advantages in my book and it’s still the distro I feel most at home with. But it’s definitely NOT beginner friendly, you’ll get the latest packages with the latest bugs and incompatibilities, sure you might get the latest performance gains, but that’s when you’re not facing the latest regressions in performance or in compatibility.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love Arch and have it on some of my systems, but it’s something that you have to know how to deal with.
I personally have gone for Manjaro now
If you must use Arch go with plain Arch. Manjaro and others essentially give you a pretty GUI installer, nothing more, and they cost you the customization of building your system from the ground up and knowing how to rebuild and fix if things go wrong for whatever reason (plus every Arch community will first ask what distro you’re running, and if it’s not pure Arch they won’t even look at your post). Also worth mentioning, AUR packages are built for Arch, they might work on Manjaro or Cachy, but they might also not due to the slight version variations.
In short, I think Arch is a great system, but it has some difficulties attached to it that could potentially make it a problem for someone that wants something that “just works”, which is what most new users want, whether they admit it or not.
With the advent of endeavor and cachy, I would argue there’s zero point to using Manjaro. If you like the arch style and figure on reading updates to ensure things don’t break, might as well be on a distro that’s just arch nicely preconfigured with a nice installer.
Manjaro adds another later of complexity to that by holding some updates back for reasons, that as far as I’ve seen doesn’t really do much in the way of helping stability.
Made the switch from Windows to Cachy back in February because Microslop is getting way too invanse and creepy for my liking, and I don’t see why I should be connected to the internet for programs as simple as Notepad. Its been a learning curve as someone who’s never used Linux before but I actually find great satisfaction in figuring out the challenges that arise, and I can usually have a local LLM I use walk me through the solution as an effective learning tool. As someone who uses their PC for a decent amount of gaming on a regular basis, it’s treated me well, and I find that it actually let’s my system run better without all the unnecessary fluff of modern iterations of Windows.
local LLM I use walk me through the solution as an effective learning tool.
Which model do you use for that exactly?
I ran Manjaro for a few years. It worked mostly but I ran into issues sometimes on updates. Got tired of that so I moved to Fedoraworkstation and it’s been rock solid.
because of the better supported and newer nvidia drivers as well as automatic hardware detection
What?
I don’t understand why arch users always say this… It’s still Linux? You can install nvidia drivers on debian or fedora, and most of the rest are baked into the kernel (most of the time), so I don’t get this.
Of course you can install them, but you need to do it. I didn’t say that it would be complicated or not possible, I just said that I really appreciated Manjaro for shipping the nvidia proprietary driver directly at the start without any trouble. And I did not say that I chose Arch-based for the nvidia driver, but for the more up-to-date drivers.
Arch is the distro for people who don’t know enough to realize all distros are basically the same but want to feel like they “know Linux” because they have to fix a bunch of stuff (spoiler: you can just read manuals of things without having your OS randomly break them)
The only time I’ve ever had to fix a bunch of stuff was when I was new and neglegent in my first arch install. What’s with all this mouth frothing tribalism? This bmost popular arch-based distros are essentially problem free and user friendly.
I’ve been on Cachy on my laptop and desktop and the only downtime I had was swapping from a Nvidia GPU to an AMD. Even then the process was well documented, easy, and risk free with snapshots.
“ARch Is tEH”… Blah blah blah say something useful.
I used Manjaro many years ago…close to a decade. It always worked for me even though I saw other complaining. Back then there was more fiddling you needed to do. I switched to fedora for a long while but wanted back to arch. I chose endeavor. I’ve been using endeavor for a couple years on my main laptop and I love it. Been working perfectly no issues. I think my next choice I will try cachy though. I have bazzite on a tv computer for steam and emulation but honestly I’d rather not have the steam deck mode and just use big picture when I want. Bazzite is a bit of a pain and I don’t think I would do it again.
I tried CachyOS as my intro to Arch based distros (excluding Steamdeck’s Steam OS) and it kept crashing on start up a day after installation. I switched back to Nobara at the time and everything worked again.
The lesson: don’t blindly trust the hype because people are full of shit and omit a lot of issues they experience.
I’ve used Manjaro daily for 8 years ans I haven’t been able to fault them. I now also have an EndeavourOS system and it’s also brilliant even though i don’t like having updates that frequently.
They’re both really good, pick one and don’t look back.
I’ve been running Garuda for over a year and had a great experience. They include a toolbox app that collects and really simplifies lots of core functions like updating mirror lists or cleaning up orphaned packages, but you don’t have to use it (I rarely do). It’s been rock solid for me, no broken packages or updates the whole time I’ve used it. I’m running the dr460nized gaming spin, which adds several gaming-specific tweaks. The community is great, and I really have had no complaints. It is a little “opinionated,” so you might fell like it’s got stuff you don’t need, but apart from that, it’s definitely worth looking into.
My Arch progression was like this:
Manjaro -> Arch -> endeavouros -> Garuda Linux
Garuda is awesome if you like Arch.
automatic hardware detection
I don’t understand that point at all. How is Arch different in that regard & I’m asking this as an experienced Linux user managing multiple Debian & Arch boxes.
So I wanted to hear some experiences of you, that you may have had in the past considering EndeavourOS, CachyOS, Manjaro and Arch itself.
If you want to go down this road & are confident in your technical ability & mental fortitude to maintain such a system long term, then just go with vanilla Arch & go through the installation process once. The real difficulty of Arch is dealing with the every day minor & major breakages that come with updates. Learning something from the install procedure is actually helpful with that. The main point is that not only is the real difficulty maintenance, but none of the popular Arch flavors do anything meaningful to help with that. It’s just you and the terminal at the end of the day. Saving a couple hours on the install process is not going to help you at all.
Manjaro is conceptually garbage ran by incompetent people so it’s not even worth considering.
I personally have gone for Manjaro now, kind of hoping that it won’t break on the attempt to cut themselves of the company side of Manjaro and becomming they’re own non-profit.
Oh okay, oof. Let me explain then. Their concept of holding back packages by one week & still having / advertising the AUR means additional instability. This or that library or dependency gets an update & then the updated AUR package will break with your one week old stuff. Furthermore far more often than not they still push the broken package, because they would need a similar contributor base to main Arch to actually vet & test everything which they’ll never have no matter what they do. What they call an additional safety net is almost never one. Sure if Arch pushed a broken grub update, that’s like the one thing you could survive with Manjaro, but if you cannot fix / research such a problem (chroot or refind & reinstall grub), then you have no business using such a distro to begin with.
CachyOS is in a weird spot, but I cannot really recommend them, because they push new kernels too soon, to the point of ridiculousness.
EoS is vanilla Arch with a gui installer basically. It’s barely a distro, but their community forums are great for new users to ask “dumb” questions. I can fully recommend every noob Arch user this community, they’ll help you even if you are not using EoS, they’ve certainly helped & taught me a lot back then.
Garuda is the same as EoS, but there is some added graphical flare, which you can add yourself to any Linux system if you wanted to.
If you are a new user who is worried about old packages, then you should be using Fedora, that’s pretty much it. Arch can be good too, but it’s for a technical user who is really interested in Linux beyond just using their computer.
MX Linux (debian-based), pre-install software to help you tedious things (installing nv drivers, disk manager, conky, etc), lot’s of regular updates, the only downside is you have to reinstall the all OS when a new version gets out (it follows the debian release cycle with a 4-6 month delay).
Why can’t you just do a normal dist-upgrade with MX when it’s Debian based?
Why Manjaro, though? Isn’t CachyOS way more popular these days? And for good reasons?
You can also set up debian to be a rolling release-based distro as well – which is comically easy to do. (All you have is to edit a text file and swap a word for “sid”.). And it’s as stable as you’d think.
t. Running Armbian (which is “debian for arm pc’s”), rolling release. Been running (and updating) it since a while and not a single weird oddities happened (like crashes, instability, etc).
