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.
Another Debian suggestion here, including for gaming and even VR. It basically just works.
Solus OS is pretty stable
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!
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 would try NixOS, because it’s declarative so it’s essentially impossible to break
I have been using Arch for (holy crap) 15 years, and I’ve never experienced an update breaking my system
And for this reason I would naysay the people recommending Nixos. I used to use Arch, and had few major problems, but lots of times that required me to engage my brain - and not always when I wanted to. One of the reasons I left was wanting something I wouldn’t have to suddenly deal with, or always keep an eye on the Arch news.
(The main reason I moved though was at that time no internet connection in the house for all those constant updates! And an Ubuntu repository in country for when I did have a slow net connection. Else I might have just stayed with Arch.)
Nix’s declarative model is great in principle, but there’s always things to go wrong in computers. If nothing else, you should always have your browser up to date for security, and up to date means updates - changes. Because Nix is aimed at technical folks, it’s likely to have many hiccups that “just need a bit more learning curve then it’ll be stable” - and that only occur for some people.
Even Mint has things that go wrong, that I can easily fix but worry me when I recommend it to Windows friends. (And I see you’re after Plasma so Mint maybe not the best.)
I agree with Nixos as well. Setting it up properly for the first time can take some time but after that it’s very much “forget it”.
I agree with this, the issue may be the packages installed rather than the distro. For a more reliable experience, I like to:
- Use Flatpak instead of the AUR where possible
- Use built-in filesystems and avoid DKMS
No, I’ve been running Endeavour forever and know his pain quite well. It’s almost always core packages that break it. None of the stuff from the AUR has ever caused issues. That being said he should be using btrfs and taking regular snapshots. Sometimes I feel like installing grub just to make recovering snapshots easier.
Twice this year I’ve had updates break the system, both were core packages. I just restore a snapshot then delay my next update for a couple days and it’s usually fixed.
That sounds like an awful system to use. I have Arch systems that date back years with unassisted updates, why does it break so much?
It’s pretty common for me at least, I went from manjaro which broke during an update, to endeavour which broke many times but by that point I clued in to btrfs and it’s snapshots. Now I have my home directory split into different hard drives and I just keep my fstab file backed up online in the event that a snapshot can’t save me. Which happened last week, rather than continue on with endeavour I tried CachyOS this time. One day I’ll install Arch the way it was meant to be, but until then…
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
Ppl are saying it’s possible but prone to cause problems
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.
:(
This sucks. I’m going to look into one of those immutable distros and use distrobox
I think I have graphics driver issues, but it could just as easily be a failing graphics card without testing. Mint has a great driver manager from Ubuntu, but LMDE didn’t seem to have any driver GUI.
The main symptom is about 30 minutes into almost any game the fps drops from 60+ to ~10. Only restarting the game seems to fix it.I don’t remember the other minor issues, so they’ve either been fixed, or so minor I stopped noticing them.
I think LMDE is good enough to use as a daily driver. The installer is quite nice too.
tldr; look into fedora silverblue maybe ?
I did try an immutable one and ngl, I was a little stressed out using it. I wanted to create a package with the
makecommand and for that I had to go through some hoops I didn’t fully understand, and still couldn’t get it to build.hmm i’ll look into that also i read everything, and you should go with bazzite i think
Bazzite download was showing 1.5 hours and kept failing to download 😂
👁️👄👁️
Lmfao. Exactly
I came here just for advertising Linux Mint once again. 👍
It’s now a very strong candidate. I’m just testing cschy os for now, but I’m still leaving heavily towards mint. Do you use it?
I have used it many years now. Couldn’t be happier. I still have Windows lying on somewhere in the hard drive, but I haven’t booted it for a year or so.
Awesome. Thank you. I’m getting the run around between distros now to see which one works the best. So far Cachy os isn’t as game ready as they claim. I had to install so much shit. Couldn’t even boot into any of the Garuda ISOs that I’ve burned on the flash drive. Was very confused with immutable distros. Tried mint, and it was cool, but didn’t try it for gaming. Man, this is a pain.
To be honest, I don’t really do much of playing with my computer. I only have dosbox for old games and then couple of other games from software center, which are made for Linux. So I’m not sure how Mint works with new games.
No worries. Thank you
One of ublue’s offerings are probably best. Immutability is great for resiliency and updates are easily rolled back if something were to go wrong. Bazzite is great for gaming, otherwise checkout Aurora and Bluefin.
I installed aurora and distrobox got me a bit confused, so it is now on the back burner until I read more about it.
You probably won’t need distrobox much unless you’re a dev. Most packages will be available as a flatpak or in homebrew. You could also consider using Nix, which will most likely have every package you’d want.
I wanted to build “ntfs-automount” from source and I wasn’t able to do it on distrobox
It should work fine, but you might have to manually install the udev rules after creating them in distrobox. Is there something you need that can’t be accomplished with systemd.mount or editing /etc/fstab?
Bazzite docs also recommend this tool - media-automount-generator - which seems to accomplish a similar thing.y
Debian stable? You don’t have issues since it has older packages? All of your hardware works just fine?
If you want stability, Debian Stable is the way to go (Servers, mission critical tasks). Even Debian Sid works great on my Legion Go.
I recommend Testing or Sid for desktops.
Been using Linux almost 30 years, went from Redhat to everything else, and now I’m back on Redhat to stay. Fedora KDE for a nice, boring, up to date, and bulletproof OS.
Definitely agree. The KDE spin used to have some quirks and bugs, but have been running it on my laptop as a daily driver for nearly six months with no real issues and it is rock solid reliable. Fedora also has a ton of community and commercial support so pretty much any Linux app will work fine on there.
I’m leaning towards an immutable, but to be fully honest, they’re a very, very new thing to me and understand nothing about them. Like when you give an idiot a grenade. That’s me with an immutable distros. Lol
I need to learn more about them and how things work, because they do sound like what I’m looking for.So, when you install things with rpm-ostree, will whatever I install stick, or will it be overridden whenever the system updates?
I get that, but sometimes I need dependcies or packages that I can’t get as flatpaks. Like today, I wanted to install a driver (or whatever it is) that’s called “ntfs-automount” and it needs to be built from source with
sudo make installAnd that I couldn’t do on an immutable distro. And it is not available anywhere except the AUR and GitHub.
Awesome and good to know. I’m actually experimenting with distros to see where this takes me. I’m currently running Nobara with snapshots set up in grub. It also has other kernels entries in grub after big updates so you can roll back if things break.
ubuntu LTS is like this for me, but i can’t recommend snaps. use it if you plan on uninstalling it and using flatpaks instead. i had a brief stint with mint and fedora and they seem good too.
in general, regardless of distro, i wait for the .1 releases after a big update, doing this has saved my ass before.
A few paragraphs would do wonders for the legibility of your post.
