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!
I was using Endeavour, btw. Needed almost zero tinkering and was good to go straight away.
But I run Linux on an ancient 2012 MacBook Pro, so eventually swapped over to Debian, btw.
I’m interested in what you’ve done withe the MBPro. I have the same thing and I’ve been wanting to do something with it since it still seems like a solid platform.
What made you switch to Debian?
Also what do you use the computer for?
For the reasons I switched to Debian see my other reply.
I use the computer for:
If you have a 15” Retina MBP, it’s been a huge pain in the ass, and multiple distros just stopped working after updates, often not long after installation. But also it’s been a good learning experience for the very same same reason. To work well in 2026 it needs the Nvidia graphics disabling - but the NVRAM defaults that Mac to Nvidia at startup for Linux, so even that bit isn’t straightforward! If you simply blacklist Nvidia it won’t boot.
I also bought a USB WiFi adapter as the Broadcom card doesn’t work initially on most distros, and can’t support WPA3 even when it does work.
Why did you change from Endeavour to Debian? Didn’t it work well on the MacBook you have? Just curious, no judging.
Endeavour worked totally fine, no issues whatsoever… or no issue where Debian does better at least.
My 2 main reasons were:
Ignorance over the point at which hardware components become so old and deprecated that bleeding edge updates might just break something one day. Couldn’t find a definitive answer, but I knew if Debian 13 works fine now it should still be working fine in 2 years. That Mac has outdated Intel/Nvidia graphics that have always been problematic on Linux, and many distros won’t even boot the live USB on it, so it felt like if any computer was ever going to spontaneously have a post-update issue it would probably be that one.
Trying the give my ageing hardware the easiest ride in its senior years. The SSD is still original and approaching 14 years of pretty heavy use, so I thought to have it surviving as long as possible an OS that might only give 0-300MB of updates in a week would be a safer bet than an OS that would have many many more gigabytes of updates over a longer period of time.
Thanks for the explanation. That reminds me an issue. I changed my default gamepad.
At least one issue with EndeavourOS I had in the past (and that’s not an issue with the distribution, but with the model of having newest Kernel) was that the newest Kernel sometimes broke the driver for my gamepad, XBox One S proprietary dongle using medusalix xone driver from AUR to be specific. So I had to wait sometimes days or longer until the driver was updated in order to use the controller. This issue could be avoided when using an LTS Kernel instead, which is very easy to setup in EndeavourOS as it comes with such a GUI.
Your given arguments makes lot of sense. So it is about stability (in the sense of not changing, not about bugs). So you seek a setup and forget installation, which is understandable and maybe would have preferred doing so too in your case.
Yes, at this stage. Although before now I’ve installed a few different things over the last couple of years as a learning experience also.
It’s not my main computer, but one I replaced. This freed me up to have a computer with no music or photos or anything on it, so I could test different distros and DEs and troubleshoot stuff without having any concerns about losing anything if I made a mistake or just erased and started over.
I’d never actually used Linux before 2023, much more familiar now.