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
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I’m very sorry to inform you that arch is the worst of the three you mentioned. The distro is known to have stability issues on a regular basis so additional tinkering and fixing is required. Endeavour and Cachy are both excellent choices though, people here have reported that they’re super stable.
manjaro had a lot of issues with stuff as basic as their certificate.
i wouldn’t trust them over endeavour or cachy and i’ve personally had a good experience on both of these.
IMO, Manjaro mostly just convinces people “Linux isn’t ready” and sends them back to windows except for a select few gluttons for punishment.
I use both EndeavourOS and Debian stable and I love them both for different reasons. The main thing about these Arch distros is updates: You can’t really tell what’s a security update and what isn’t, so you either end up updating and relogging/rebooting a lot or not doing updates and being vulnerable. I wrote a script and systemd timer to check for updates for certain software (like browsers) and do them without updating the rest of the system so I can then update the rest of the system more infrequently.
After leaving Bazzite I jumped to Garuda. It was easy and I haven’t had any problems. Things run good. Gaming runs good. Pamac runs updates when I shut down. Is good.
This thread is a testament to the same fault of soul that caused stack exchange’s demise at the hands of LLMs. Because even though LLMs are trained on scrapped data from stack exchange, and Lemmy (this very threat too most probably), LLMs aren’t snarky, demeaning and ‘why are you stupid? this is clearly a stupid question’.
I first dove into Linux March 2020 with Mint. The next day the pandemic lockdowns started. I hadn’t heard about the pandemic at that point.
My internet was shut off a couple weeks later which made learning how to use Linux significantly more difficult. I had downloaded a wide variety of distro’s though and had plenty of time to try them out but only had the man pages to learn from, which don’t really make a lot of the connections I needed to get things working right on my computer, a Frankenstein’s monster which had a lot of quirks and was made from parts salvaged from the trash or donated out of pity by friends. Oh and the CPU was partially delidded by a tornado and still works like a champ to this day.
I went from Mint to various Ubuntu’s, played with a bunch of Puppy’s, didn’t care for Zorin or Fedora for unrelated reasons, almost settled on MX but messed something up, and long story short, I started using Manjaro KDE since September 2021 and have stuck with it. For my use case and equipment at the time, it just worked.
I’ve tried a few other distros, breifly, mostly in VM’s and almost changed to Open SUSE Tumbleweed but ultimately stuck with the Manjaro. There have been a few frustrations along the way but the issues stemmed more from my low-budget equipment, corrupt and incompetant internet service providers and incompetant and corrupt monitor and cable manufacturers, than anything Manjaro did and some of those problems were solved by their (mostly) friendly forum people.
I got lucky and managed to find a way to build a new computer since then, a fairly decent one for a home desktop in my opinion. I don’t foresee myself changing anytime soon. (New PC: AMD 7950XT; ASRock Taichi mobo; ASRock Radeon 6950 GPU; 128GB RAM)
I’ve been using cachyos for a couple years and had no issues with it. For me it has enough ‘out of the box’ functionality to jump in, but also allows you do do whatever you want to customize it. I will always recommend it to people who have at least a bit of tech knowledge and just want to get started and not have to build everything from scratch.
I switched from EndeavourOS to OpenSUSE tumbleweed.
Not because EOS is bad, the contrary, i had a really good and smooth experience and probably only had one big issue, but my fault for not searching through EOS’ forum xD, that caused a total wipe and fresh install.
EOS beeing arch based, you need to keep regularly your system up to date and keep your system clean ! Beeing bleeding edge is a double sword… That’s why I switched to openSUSE TW, cause I needed something close to bleeding endge but also very stable for a hybrid server-gaming system.
This is also doable with EOS, but there’s way more personal investement to keep it stable.
Would totally recommend EOS to someone who want to tinker and customize his/her system and learning a bit more about how UNIX system works on a deeper level.
Nothing against OpenSUSE tumbleweed, as I’ve heard great things, but I thought it was also rolling release, very similar to Arch…?
I’ve been daily driving linux-based OS for about a year and a half now. I started with NixOS per the recommendation of a friend. It’s great for stability and the config-based setup is super cool. I found the software to be a bit behind in updates and the way the nix store worked caused some hiccups with certain things I wanted to do. I still use it for my servers, but switched to CachyOS for my clients.
CachyOS has been great. I use the Shelly GUI to install all of the software. I have Nvidia (RTX 3080) and have had a really smooth experience. The one issue that sticks out to me is there seems to be an issue with switching from a single monitor setup (for sunshine streaming) back to my triple monitor setup including my 32:9 240hz monitor - this became an issue recently after some updates. Could be a KDE thing rather than CachyOS thing, though.
FWIW I know nothing about how to get regular arch working - I’ve heard it’s a bit complex, but CachyOS has been anything but that.
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.
I think everyone needs to stop positioning Arch as something complicated. It’s not. Every Linux distro has nasty moments, and you’re better equipped to deal with them when you understand what’s happening. Perhaps that’s difficult concept for a newcomer (the idea that you need to understand what you’re doing, at least to some degree). But apart from the will to learn, there’s nothing really difficult and complicated in there. I had so many weird little moments with Fedora (which I assume should just mostly work out of the box), that if I had no knowledge Arch helped me to gain, I don’t know what would I do. I’ve consider migrating home shared computer from Fedora to Arch, and not doing it simply because it’s still mostly works on its own, and the Arch magic for me is in the customisations I have made. Fedora gave me unbootable system more times (with me doing nothing! Just updating) than Arch with me tinkering with basically everything all the time, that I won’t even say Arch is some complex mess. Rather the opposite, I think. That’s why I think scaring the newcomers away may be the wrong thing. It’s not too difficult if you’ve arrived to this point already. All you need is to accept you would learn along the way, and Arch (and the community!) would help.
Re-read my post, and tell me where did I said Arch is complicated? My view is summarized in the last paragraph, and I can summarize it even more here “good, but not beginner friendly”. Arch expects you to know how to deal with it, it expects you to read the news, it expects you know how to downgrade a package and it expects you’re comfortable in a terminal. A newcomer is unlikely to even know about any of that, they already have to learn a lot of other things like package manager, learning what’s the name of each program and how they behave slightly different from what they’re used to, etc, they don’t need to learn about pacnew/pacsave files on top of all of that. If you’re already comfortable in Linux, yeah, Arch is amazing, but if you’re presented with a terminal not even knowing what KDE/Gnome are you’re going to have a bad time.
And that’s the thing, it’s not that it’s complicated, but it’s the unknowns unknowns that will get a new user, they don’t know they need a session manager, they don’t know they need a printer daemon, etc. And if you bypass that by using Manjaro/Cachy, you’re now in a position of using a distro that expects you to know about that but didn’t taught you about them.
After Archinstall many derivatives lost their appel.
You know the weirdest part? Arch used to have a TUI installer when I first migrated to it, it lost it at some point between 2009 and 2012 (since I discovered it didn’t existed anymore on a laptop I bought in 2012. Weird that they redid an installer after all these years (and yeah, I know that technically pacstrap is an installer, but it doesn’t do much)
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.
as a longtime fan of looking at other people dotfiles and trying different setups, NixOS speaks to me on a spiritual level. Its dotfiles for your hardware AND software, all contained beuatifully in one place 99% of the time, and thats by choice even! You dont even have to do that much declaratively if you dont want to. Tons of automation tools have been developed, theres appimage support, etc.
can get annoying the first time you have to setup your own flake for a small project that doesnt have one, but once you learn it it goes from a real roadblock to an occational annoyance that i can personally totally live with.
woulsnt reccommend it ti a first timer unless theyre a special breed. Enough fundamentals dont follow most other linux systems that its definitely an added struggle if youre also trying to learn those.
if your idea of FUN is heavily insipired by Dwarf Fortress as mine is tho, its the best thing since sliced bread
My Arch progression was like this:
Manjaro -> Arch -> endeavouros -> Garuda Linux
Garuda is awesome if you like Arch.
I love Garuda. I tried Bazzite and CachyOS, but I just keep ending up back on Garuda. I feel like it is the only one that really lets me just use my computer and not think about the OS when I don’t want to.
Why Manjaro, though? Isn’t CachyOS way more popular these days? And for good reasons?
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.
