Hi all, Relatively long time Linux user (2017 to be precise), and about two 3rds of that time has been on Arch and its derivatives.
Been running Endeavour OS for at least 2.5 years now. It’s a solid distro until it’s not. I’d go for months without a single issue then an update comes out of nowhere and just ruins everything to either no return, or just causes me to chase after a fix for hours, and sometimes days. I’m kinda getting tired of this trend of sudden and uncalled for issues.
It’s like a hammer drops on you without you seeing it. I wish they were smaller issues, no, they’re always major. Most of the time I’d just reinstall, and I hate that. It’s so much work for me.
I set things the way I like them and then they’re ruined, and the hunt begins. I have been wanting to switch for a long time, and I honestly have even been looking into some of those immutable distros (that’s how much I don’t want to be fixing my system.
I’m tired, I just want to use my system to get work done). I was also told that Nobara is really good (is it? Never tried it). My only hold back — and it’s probably silly to some of you— is the AUR. I love it.
It’s the most convenient thing ever, and possibly the main reason why I have stuck with Arch and its kids. Everything is there.
So, what do y’all recommend? I was once told by some kind soul to use an immutable distro and setup “distrobox” on it if I wanted the AUR.
I’ve never tried this “distrobox” thing (I can research it, no problem). I also game here and there and would like to squeeze as much performance as I can out of my PC (all AMD, BTW, and I only play single player games).
So, I don’t know what to do. I need y’all’s suggestions, please. I’ll aggregate all of the suggestions and go through them and (hopefully) come up with something good for my sanity. Please suggest anything you think fits my situation. I don’t care, I will 100% appreciate every single suggestion and look into it.
I’m planning to take it slow on the switch, and do a lot of research before switching. Unless my system shits the bed more than now then I don’t know. I currently can’t upgrade my system, as I wouldn’t be able to log in after the update. It just fails to log in.
I had to restore a 10 days old snapshot to be able to get back into my damn desktop. I have already copied my whole home directory into another drive I have on my PC, so if shit hits the fan, I’ll at least have my data. Help a tired brother out, please <3. Thank you so much in advance.
Debian stable. It’s been here for 30 years, it’s the largest community OS, it’ll likely be here in 30 years (or until we destroy ourselves). Any derivative is subject to higher probability of additional issues, stoppage of development in the long run, etc.
If you’re extra lazy, Ubuntu LTS with Ubuntu Pro (free) enabled. You could use that for 10 years (or until Canonical cancels it) before you need to upgrade. Ubuntu is the least risky alternative for boring operation since it’s used in the enterprise and Canonical is profitable. The risk there is Canonical doing an IPO and Ubuntu going the way of tightening access like Red Hat did.
I’m in complete agreement with this post. Debian is pretty meticulous with their releases and Ubuntu LTS has a predictable release cadence if that’s more important than “when it’s ready”
Also, whether you see it as a plus or minus, windows wsl defaults to Ubuntu. So, msoft also seems to be somewhat invested in them long term.
Ubuntu? Never. I have had longer less problem free with Arch than Ubuntu. Last time I tried it for a project it was broken on install.
I am all for Debian, love it. But Ubuntu has been crappy since day one.
Interesting. We use it for work since 2016 (high hundreds of workstations) and I’ve used it since 2005 on variety of machines and use cases without significant issues. We’ve also used it to operate a couple of datacenters (OpenStack private clouds) with good results. That said I’ve been using LTS exclusively since 2014 and don’t use PPAs since 2018-20 and it’s been solid. My main machine hasn’t been reinstalled since the initial install in 2014.
Seriously? You have successfully managed to upgrade Ubuntu since 2014? Just to be clear, on desktops?
So you went through 3 desktop environment changes, systemd changes, snap environment changes, and it all worked? I am shocked.
Like I said the last time I even tried Ubuntu a default out of then box feature was broken by default.
And with desktops, it’s always some thing: the snap needs editing and is missing dependencies, a ppa is required, etc. On the server it’s fine but the desktop environment usually requires effort every other update.
Like I said, even at ububtu 4 I broke it in a week and went back to Debian.
On desktop, yeah. Unity > GNOME, upstart > systems, snap. I don’t fuck with snap, I just use it as intended, I don’t try to remove it. I think I started actively using it in 2016. As a software developer I understand that only the happy path is reasonably tested so I try not to go too far out of it. 😂
I typically wait for the LTS point release before upgrading. I check the release notes. I check if anything is broken after the upgrade, fix as needed. I’m sure I’ve done some stuff when the migration to GNOME happened. But that’s to be expected when a major component change occurs. If you had some non-default config or workflow, it might require rework. E.g. some custom PulseAudio config broke on my laptop with the migration to Pipewire in 24.04. But on that legendary desktop install, the only unexpected breakage was during an upgrade when the power went out. Luckily upgrades are just apt operations so I was able to recover and finish the upgrade manually.
I think a friend is running a 2012 or 2010 install. 🥲
And I’ve also swapped multiple hardware platforms on this install. 😂 Went AMD > Intel > AMD > more AMD. Swapped SSDs, went single to mirror, increased in size.
I mean… once you kick the Windows-brain reinstall habit and you learn enough, the automatic instinct upon something unexpected becomes to investigate and fix it. Reinstall is just so much more laborious on a customized machine.
I’ve updated my gaming rig twice with no issue using Ubuntu
20.04 to 22.04 to 24.04
Your experience is very different from mine. I usually have to dig in and fix crap that shouldnt be wrong in ubuntu long before I even get to the upgrade phase! Lots of circular problems: oh this snap doesn’t have the full dependencies. Thats ok, I know how to edit them. Except that didn’t work, so lets add the PPA. But that was out of date, lets build from scratch… and so on.
Edit: Let me add something: Glad it worked for you. And Ubuntu is Linux, and we have that in common, and I want to make sure this type of discussion is always framed under “SAME TEAM!”
I’ll second Debian. I run it on backports and it’s reasonably stable, but if you want it rock-solid, don’t do that.
You might want to keep your browser more up to date than the rest of your OS. That’s up to you as the user. Mozilla has a deb you can add to Apt manually, should you choose.
apt broke my entire computer, so no
Another Debian suggestion here, including for gaming and even VR. It basically just works.
Debian. I’ve had installations which went trough several major version upgrades, I’ve worked with ‘set and forget’ setups where someone originally installed Debian and I get my hands on it 3-5 years later to upgrade it and it just works. Sure, it might not be as fancy as some alternatives and some things may need manual tweaking here and there, but the thing just works and even on rare occasion something breaks you’ll still have options to fix it assuming you’re comfortable with plain old terminal.
I was actually thinking of that. How’s testing and unstable, are they good, too?
They are the opposite of “set it and forget it”.
Probably the most maintenance-heavy distros out there.
They’re like Arch, if the Arch maintainers didn’t care about keeping the system working.They are excactly what the name implies. Testing is generally pretty good, but it’s still testing. And unstable is also what the name implies. People, myself included back in the day, run both as daily drivers, but if you want rock stable distribution installing unstable revision might not be the best choise.
I came here just for advertising Linux Mint once again. 👍
It’s now a very strong candidate. I’m just testing cschy os for now, but I’m still leaving heavily towards mint. Do you use it?
I have used it many years now. Couldn’t be happier. I still have Windows lying on somewhere in the hard drive, but I haven’t booted it for a year or so.
Awesome. Thank you. I’m getting the run around between distros now to see which one works the best. So far Cachy os isn’t as game ready as they claim. I had to install so much shit. Couldn’t even boot into any of the Garuda ISOs that I’ve burned on the flash drive. Was very confused with immutable distros. Tried mint, and it was cool, but didn’t try it for gaming. Man, this is a pain.
To be honest, I don’t really do much of playing with my computer. I only have dosbox for old games and then couple of other games from software center, which are made for Linux. So I’m not sure how Mint works with new games.
No worries. Thank you
Been using Linux almost 30 years, went from Redhat to everything else, and now I’m back on Redhat to stay. Fedora KDE for a nice, boring, up to date, and bulletproof OS.
Definitely agree. The KDE spin used to have some quirks and bugs, but have been running it on my laptop as a daily driver for nearly six months with no real issues and it is rock solid reliable. Fedora also has a ton of community and commercial support so pretty much any Linux app will work fine on there.
One of ublue’s offerings are probably best. Immutability is great for resiliency and updates are easily rolled back if something were to go wrong. Bazzite is great for gaming, otherwise checkout Aurora and Bluefin.
I installed aurora and distrobox got me a bit confused, so it is now on the back burner until I read more about it.
You probably won’t need distrobox much unless you’re a dev. Most packages will be available as a flatpak or in homebrew. You could also consider using Nix, which will most likely have every package you’d want.
I wanted to build “ntfs-automount” from source and I wasn’t able to do it on distrobox
It should work fine, but you might have to manually install the udev rules after creating them in distrobox. Is there something you need that can’t be accomplished with systemd.mount or editing /etc/fstab?
Bazzite docs also recommend this tool - media-automount-generator - which seems to accomplish a similar thing.y
tldr; look into fedora silverblue maybe ?
I did try an immutable one and ngl, I was a little stressed out using it. I wanted to create a package with the
makecommand and for that I had to go through some hoops I didn’t fully understand, and still couldn’t get it to build.hmm i’ll look into that also i read everything, and you should go with bazzite i think
Bazzite download was showing 1.5 hours and kept failing to download 😂
👁️👄👁️
Lmfao. Exactly
Fedora Workstation has been really good in my experience. The available software is shockingly up to date and I haven’t run into much breakage of any kind in the year or so I’ve been using it across 2 systems (despite my best efforts every few months when the urge to tinker hits me). I do occasionally run into issues caused by the default SELinux policies, but they’re not especially difficult to work around if you’re comfortable using the terminal.
I do share your sentiment about the AUR - I definitely miss it at times. That said, Flatpaks and the fact that pre-built RPMs are so commonplace have both softened the blow a lot.
Also came from Arch which always breaks. Fedora workstation is great
You want bazzite, for this usecase, disregard anyone who suggests something that isn’t immutable, all of the immutable suggestions are valid, but if it’s not immutable, it is huge downgrade for this usecase.
I’m leaning towards an immutable, but to be fully honest, they’re a very, very new thing to me and understand nothing about them. Like when you give an idiot a grenade. That’s me with an immutable distros. Lol
I need to learn more about them and how things work, because they do sound like what I’m looking for.with bazzite it’s just regular fedora essentially except substitute the normal rpm commands for rpm-ostree and you’re essentially golden
So, when you install things with rpm-ostree, will whatever I install stick, or will it be overridden whenever the system updates?
It’ll stick, but you’re really meant to use flathub/flatpak to install things wherever possible, rpm-ostree is kindof a backup method.
I get that, but sometimes I need dependcies or packages that I can’t get as flatpaks. Like today, I wanted to install a driver (or whatever it is) that’s called “ntfs-automount” and it needs to be built from source with
sudo make installAnd that I couldn’t do on an immutable distro. And it is not available anywhere except the AUR and GitHub.
if you can make an rpm you can install it with rpm-ostree like any other fedora based distro. Immutability doesn’t prevent this.
Awesome and good to know. I’m actually experimenting with distros to see where this takes me. I’m currently running Nobara with snapshots set up in grub. It also has other kernels entries in grub after big updates so you can roll back if things break.
Debian. Solid as a mountain.
How easy is it to get gaming on Debian (as OP mentioned occasional gaming)? I use Popos myself, so all nvidia drivers and gamemode and such works out the box.
Install Pop OS and let System 76 worry about Nvidia drivers
I have Fedora on my work laptop and vanilla Arch on my tinkering laptop.
I think instead of thinking about “set it and forget it”, you might want to think about “if shit happens, how fast can I fix it?”. That is because stuff break or there are bugs . If you use a very old and LTS distro, you might be comfortable but there might be bugs that do not get fixed until much later. Eg: Debian’s kernel used to be able to suspend-then-hibernate, then they jump to one that cannot. So if you want that feature back, you need to wait… until Debian catches up with mainline’s fixes.
So if you only use your computer for web, email, movie. Then any distro will work.
Now, imo there are 2 types of problems in Linux:
- Boot/GRUB/partition problems: this can happen if you’re dual boot, or a config goes wrong. To fix, usually you need to boot a live cd.
Pop OS would be #1 choice just because it has a “Recovery Partition” with live environment. You can reinstall the entire OS while you’re on the plane, without wifi or any USB.
Arch would be #2 here, just because the arch iso is so good. It is minimal and has all the tools you need to fix stuff: partitions, wifi…etc. Plus, it boots in tty so it is faster for fixing.
- Problems with library mismatch: for this you want one with good snapshots built in. So OpenSUSE or if you know how to configure btrfs, maybe Fedora. I would still go Pop OS here, so you can configure btrfs AND get the recovery from point 1) above. Linux Mint would be #2 choice because they have timeshift built in.
So the TLDR for you is: pick Pop OS for the recovery partition. Also, use btrfs. Lastly, configure your disk nicely, i.e. dont do any crazy LVM encryption, just use standard layout so when comes the time to fix, it is easier.
Debian is a good option but I’d actually recommend Fedora. It’s been very stable for me.
Second this. Rock solid. Specifically Fedora but obviously Debian is very stable.
I put Fedora on a laptop as a whim almost 2 years ago.
My main computers are arch, but. I had an iso handy and hadn’t used anything from based in years.
I am surprised at how quickly it gets updates. Gimp was at 3 before arch stable.
Anyways, I just keep updating the laptop and it just keeps working. I have yet to actually do anything for maintenance on it.
Use distrobox brother, it is really underrated, I use it on my fedora PC so I can have access to the AUR all the time, you could even use Debian with it and have access the the AUR on a 2 year out of date install, seriously, it is really worth the effort of checking out, changed my Linux experience forever.
I use distrobox on my steam deck and i use it for work 😂
Solus OS is pretty stable
