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!
EndeavorOS is my go to for arch based systems. But with the archinstall script I’d say just give vanilla a go
But I’ve been wanting to tell people that I use Arch.
Biblically accurate arch user
Stay away from Manjaro.
I’ve heard great things about Endeavor and Cachy, but personally use Garuda. Highly recommend it.
Woah I used Garuda years ago and loved it at the time. Surprised it’s still going strong!
Tried Manjaro for a few months before it broke. EndeavourOS has been treating me well for about a year now.
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.
EndeavourOS is my first choice, CachyOS is my second choice.
EndeavourOS. It’s like Arch, but a bit easier with a few automation and gui stuff builtin. It’s still heavy on terminal usage and it comes light out of the box. I switched from Manjaro to EndeavourOS, because Manjaro gave me some problems (especially their package manager and because of the AUR too, and I didn’t like the maintainers, no further comment). It’s my daily driver for years now. I use it for everything, daily usage, little programming, gaming on Steam and especially RetroArch too. I’m a huge RetroArch fan. :-) So if you plan to use base Archlinux or Manjaro, then I can recommend to use EndeavourOS a lot.
Cachy OS is probably a good choice too, because their focus on performance optimizations. But they do also have a bit more, let’s say bloat, out of the box and their branding is a bit strong it seems. It’s a bit farther away from base Archlinux than EndeavourOS is.
Same, I use endeavorOS. Its just arch with a nice installer.
I was teaching a friend Linux, by ways of running through the manual Arch installation process and finally got to be on the other side of the ‘Ok, now that we’ve spent a ton of time doing this the hard way, here(endeavorOS) is how you use tools to do it in 3 seconds’.
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.
I use plain Arch, but if you are just gonna use it as a media center, use Debian or something like it. A media center doesn’t need to be up to date if you’re just using it for TV and retro gaming. However, how mediocre are we talking? Are you intending to run full steam games or are you planning on streaming them from another computer?
If the latter, I think Debian or even a healthy rPi running RetroPie might be up your alley because you can install Kodi and SteamLink on that.
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.
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.
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
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.
So you basically hold them to a higher standard than google, apple, Microsoft, cisco, Amazon. Because theyve all had outages cause by certs expiring.
Its a common issue and its not a huge deal. The package manager cert was a big outage but their wiki website cert is the most minor shit ever.
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.
The only Arch distros I know that are solid are Arch itself, Steam OS, and Cachy OS. The latter 2 have meaningful optimizations for their intended use which is really the only excuse for a new derivative IMO besides things like different release schedules.
Vanilla arch
In no case manjaro
