I’ve been using Debian (and formerly Ubuntu) for many years.
But I’ve been wanting to tell people that I use Arch.
I’ve been considering the following distros:
- Arch
- Cachy
- Manjaro
- Any others?
I’m leaning towards Arch or Cachy. This is for a mediocre laptop that I’m planning to use as a media center: Kodi, Retroarch, Steam, etc. Should I even be using Arch for this? Maybe Debian is more stable…
Sorry if this has been asked before. Thanks for any tips!
Use whatever you’re comfortable with, and what you know works.
On that note, Manjaro and CachyOS don’t work. You should avoid them. They both make changes that harm reliability, and both frequently make avoidable mistakes (especially Manjaro). If you need something like those two, EndeavourOS is a better option, or just base Arch Linux.
Arch Linux itself is a good distro, but made for a specific target audience. If you want to tinker with your system and learn along the way, it may be a good option for you. If you want to “set and forget” your media center PC, a stable-release distro like Debian or Rocky might be better options for you.
How does Cachy not work? How do you even use it in the same sentence as Manjaro? Cachy is just Arch + some optimized packages provided by their repos. You can theoretically migrate from pure Arch to Cachy by adding their repos and even the other way around.
CachyOS has a structure that’s much closer to Arch than Manjaro, but they still replace the majority of Arch repos with their own. I’ve seen both their repos and the optimizations they apply being the root cause of issues on some friends installs.
They did not replace repos, they exit in addition to the normal Arch repos, you can install any package from these repos if you want.