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 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they use the unmodified AUR which is running under the assumption that you have an updated Arch system, not one weeks out-of-date.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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
And I did not say that I chose Arch-based for the nvidia driver, but for the more up-to-date drivers.
But that’s what I mean… It’s not to do with being arch-based, but what the distribution chooses to ship. Bazzite is Fedora based and also ships with the proprietary nvidia drivers.
For the record, I don’t have an opinion on your choice of distro, use what works for you. I just see so commonly from arch users that they have access to the latest drivers, but that is true of anything running a recent Linux kernel. I was just wondering what about arch makes this belief so strong.
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.
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 a avoid 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.
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?
Ill put it this way; me and a mate switched to Linux as our main drivers at roughly the same time. Both of us have a background in development (him more), I switched to Fedora, he to Cachy.
It is now roughly two years later. He has switched his distro multiple more times. Im still on Fedora because it just works.
Arch based distros are for tinkerers and customisers. Sure it can just work too, but if you dont tinker then theres no real point/ advantage.
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 important worked again.
The lesson: don’t blindly trust the hype because people are full of shit and omit a lot of issues they experience.
Why Manjaro, though? Isn’t CachyOS way more popular these days? And for good reasons?
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…?
Bootable BTRFS snapshots and a less fast update schedule are the biggest differences AFAIK.
I would probably have gone with Slowroll if it was ready to go when I installed Tumbleweed.
I’m very sorry to inform you that
archmanjaro 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.I think you meant to say Manjaro
That’s absolutely true
No issues here (: for years
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.
I’ll advice you to go with Fedora, because rolling release distro often cause issues, but Fedora has not too old packages like Debian and gets major updates 2x a year, don’t worry about driver and app updates you’ll get them as you would on amy distro.
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.
