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!
Manjaro isn’t recommended. They made lots of weird decisions and mistakes in the past, maybe still do. Wouldn’t trust them. Endeavour or Cachy are the current recommendations for “easy Arch”. If you’re able to install and maintain vanilla Arch, I’d recommend Arch though. Cut the middleman.
Hi, in my opinion, the best distro is always the one that everything builds upon. So if you want maximal control, etc. Just use arch. Its also great if you want to learn how to troubleshoot.
Do you use Arch?
Not currently but I have in the past.
Best Arch distro?
Just install vanilla Arch. If you don’t want to install it manually,
archinstallworks fine. But you really should install it manually, following the Installation Guide on the Arch Wiki, at least once.Don’t use Manjaro.
Arch if you want to do the install completely by yourself and/or have some setup that can’t be replicated by the usual installers.
EndeavourOS/Cachy if you want a simple GUI installer for Arch, but you don’t get bragging rights.
Don’t use Manjaro
Used to be Manjaro, because it’s got sane opinions and I’m not looking to make maintaining that machine a new hobby. I don’t mind the curated “almost” rolling release, but they’re getting worse about simple things (like maintaining their own certs) and I’ve decided to move on.
Just plain Arch, been using it for the past 5 years. Haven’t told anyone unless askes though.
Same here, just plain Arch (BTW). I also don’t mention it IRL unless someone asks, and they never have lol.
Here, I fixed your post for you:
I’ve been wanting to tell people that I use Arch.
I’ve been considering the following distros:
- Arch
- Not Arch
- Not Arch
- Any others?
I’m leaning towards Arch or Not Arch.
Manjaro is the best, but you’ll have to see it for yourself.
Don’t trust the “wisdom of the crowd.” It does not exist.
Most of that is pedantic. Its a solid distro with a sane out of the box configuration. However you shouldnt use the AUR on it unless you know what you’re doing.
Most of it speaks to their lack of competency. Issues like this are less frequent on arch and the whole point of this distro is that It’s supposed to be an easier arch.
it is in fact harder arch.
Its a small team and those are mistakes. We can find hundreds of examples of major companies with IT teams in the 100s making those same mistakes. The solution was figured out by the team and fixed. The original version of that GH page that most people remember was much longer but its been significantly reduced as most of the claims were disputed and the author had to reel back their claims or remove them outright. Now whats left is just a few pedantic complaints.
With arch they make those mistakes less but they shift a lot more configuration onto the user and when those mistakes get made they dont need to take any blame because it was the user who made the mistake. Arch has pushed updates that have broken bootloaders how many times? I’d consider that to be catastrophic failure on any distro except arch where i think its fine as the user should be able to fix their bootloader pretty easily.
Arch should not be used by beginners and hacking together a distro to make that happen was never a good idea. A team that cannot even figure out SSL certs should not have even attempted it.
Yeah, none of that matters.
On the other hand, https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/tampered-linux-mint-iso-linked-on-official-website
Nobody mentions this because it’s not ‘cool’ and doesn’t make you fit in with losers/strangers on the internet.
All of it matters, hard disagree, even if none of them are individually that bad it shows an insane degree of incompetence
the linux mint thing happened one time and was resolved, it shows no history of being incompetent, that’s why it isn’t mentioned, it’s hardly worth mention, one security breach in the entire history of the project is not a big deal.
furthermore i personally don’t think mint is a good distro either so, whatever.
I use cachy os for the optimizations on modern hardware and access to newer packages. I use it on ny pc for gaming and laptop for development. I find it more convenient than arch. But I can’t say if it is better.
can someone who runs arch btw on weak hardware, like dual-core U-series i5 and such, tell me how they’re handling AUR and friends? every time I bring that up I get downvotes as if I’m some MICROS~1 agent paid to besmirch arch btw’s good name and whatnot…
the idea that I hafta build and compile shit on a puny dual-core in 2026 is fucking ludicrous to me, never mind the bloat and cruft from all the build tools and deps for every possible stack. so what obvious solution am I missing? like, how do you handle a full system upgrade, say you got like ten things from AUR in addition to regular packages, what does that look like?
You can use an AUR mirror repo to avoid compiling. Chaotic looks like the most popular one.
One suggestion is to look for
-binversions of the packages you want. Those are precompiled and should install only marginally slower than a regular pacman package.first time I heard of this, thanks. so running it thusly it’s no different than a copr or apt repo?
Not quite as that its user-created and submitted.
But yeah lots of packages have a -bin counterpart that will install a lot quicker than compiling it for yourself.
aight let me tell you MY arch experience. itll be a long one.
i first installed arch with the install script and later manually, i ran this setup for quite some time, and as time goes, small erros cascade into bigger ones. it got to the point where i was reconfiguring system configs every week to fix something that broke from an update. the thing that ultimately caused the most trouble was converting my existing ext4 system to btrfs. this caused all sorts of issue primarily with gaming performance (i had to disable cpu boosting in order to not have constant lag spikes for example). this old system was a mess held together with duct tape and hope, it broke with EVERY update, and not at small scales. at some point i had to reinstall grub everytime i changed something in my boot order. Ultimately i decided 2 days ago it was time for a reinstall. i tried installing it normally, i followed the official install instructions and got greeted by a grub shell. i fucked something up during the install, so i decided fuck it, i will use archinstall script again. then it took me legit 6 hours to get my system running in a way i could use it, tgen the next day an additional 3 to get everything set up so i can game with proper OBS recording and all.
now i have a perfectly functioning Arch setup. and a lot more performance (even tho the setup should be the same, like i really dont know what was wrong with my old setup)
arch WILL be a hassle at some point. in turn you get bleeding edge packages, no bloat, complete customisation, a great learning opportunity, the AUR, and (if properly set up) great performance.
i like arch. i wouldnt use anything else.
I use Arch. I haven’t tried Endeavour or Cachy as Arch just works for me. That’s not to say I had an easy time installing it as my first Linux distro after leaving Windows, but after reading through the wiki and installing it a couple times in my PC, I like how much control over my system it gives me.
EndeavourOS is my first choice, CachyOS is my second choice.
I tried it, liked it, bricked my system, and now I enjoy EndeavourOS because it’s simple and easy.
Check out the Fedora Atomic distros Silverblue, Kinoite, etc. You can just run arch in a distrobox for your arch needs while keeping a clean and stable core.
