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. 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 can’t speak for the desktop side, but for my server it’s been running without interruption for years. About once per week I do something stupid and use all available memory, but it hasn’t crashed once. It just runs a bit slow until I free up some RAM, then Docker comes back to life once I free up some disk space. I definitely recommend it for anyone who wants a server OS that just works.
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.
Thank you. I’ve run Fedora for a long while, too. Albeit, it was a while ago (not sure how good it is now), but I’ve never had any luck with its kde version. It was always broken (for me at least). Also, hunting for apps was kind of a big issue. Then come copr repos. But I guess we have a good case with flatpaks now. Even thought I couldn’t use them before due to storage constraints, but now, that’s not an issue. So, I’ll keep Fedora in mind. I appreciate you
I reckon that mantle should go to Fedora Silverblue over Fedora Workstation.
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”
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.
Another Debian suggestion here, including for gaming and even VR. It basically just works.
Look. I’ve been there. I started my Linux journey with Arch based distros, then distrohopped a lot, and finally found the best for me, and what I personally consider the best either for normal users or those that don’t want to do any maintenance.
It’s the Universal Blue family of distros: Bazzite (gaming / KDE / gnome) Aurora (standard / development / KDE) Bluefin (standard / development / gnome)
Set it and forget about it. It just freaking works. For GUI apps install from the Discover app store (which uses Flatpak), for cli apps use Homebrew (brew install whatever). If you can’t find something, open Distrobox (already included) create an Arch container, install whatever you want from the AUR, and use it like you’re used to. It works like freaking magic.
If somehow you manage to brick your installation, when you reboot you’ll be able to boot to a past snapshot.
You just can’t fail with this. It’s the best of the best IMHO.
You absolutely can fail. I daily drive bazzite but many things have been pretty rough:
Any coding apps that will use an external device -> you can’t use flatpak. You have to use distrobox that constantly freezes your entire mouse for 3-5 seconds upon any sort of dialog, settings, saving, anything where it has to access the filesystem. Then you have to add udev rules to directories that in the documentation says not to write to, and reloading the rules doesn’t work for testing, you have to fully restart with every minor change or it will seem like the change didn’t work.
Luckily most device drivers seem to work in the provided arch distrobox but holy dependency hell. Things will fail to install because they need a package that exists on the host but not the container so you get an unsolvable “file exists” conflict. When installing a package, it will sometimes just try to grab an old version of a dependency specifically that will 404 out instead of just grabbing the most recent version (never happened on arch itself to me)
Setting up a plasma vault with gocryptfs was not fun figuring out how. Also ran into tons of dependency problems and the fact that fedora just abandoned it specifically. Ended up just having to stick the binary in a random folder and point to it.
Any sort of document authentication/signing -> doesn’t work and will not work in the future for a long time.
You absolutely have to install rpms still for corectrl, any external devices, like drawing tablets, etc…
Some games inexplicably use <50% GPU and <40% CPU with terrible framerates and will not go any higher (or lower) no matter what, switching between low and high settings and resolution results in 0fps change.
When I have my config set and don’t have to change anything, it is super super nice to never have to manually update, but anything outside of very basic usage is weaving through nonstandard undocumented territory.
Bazzite trades maintenance headaches for configuration and installation headaches. For me, that is worth it.
I’m sorry Bazzite didn’t work out for you.
Your use case sounds like a better fit for Arch, since you have very specific needs like adding uncommon device drivers, gocryptfs, udev rules, etc. For anyone else, wanting to try Bazzite, I’ll answer the rest of the topics:
Flatpak apps with external devices
All apps I’ve tried support external devices just fine, in the event the app you need doesn’t support external devices out of the box, try adding USB device access through the app’s permissions in the System Settings app.
Distrobox Freezes & dependencies
I have an all AMD desktop PC, and an intel laptop, Distrobox runs perfectly fine. Every package will rely on dependencies inside Distrobox.
Edit: after writing this post, I realized I needed someway to de-drm my Audible books, so I installed the Libation RPM in my Fedora Distrobox, it failed to launch because it needed libicu or something like that, so I opened the Fedora Distrobox terminal and typed sudo dnf install libicu, done. Launched perfectly like it was installed on my base Bazzite installation. But all the dependencies remain isolated, unable to crap all over my system if something happens. My system remains shielded from dependency apocalypse.
Encryption
Bazzite supports LUKS full disk encryption.
corectrl
Use LACT, you can install it through the Bazzite Portal (that’s Bazzite 1st run app, you can run it anytime though)
RPMs are needed for any external devices, like drawing tablets, etc…
Any external devices would be a great overstatement. I have the standard PC Peripherals, then I have: xbox 360 controllers, xbox series X controllers, Thrustmaster Wheel, Logitech x56 Flight Stick, none of them require any RPM and just work out of the box, unlike on Windows. For drawing tablets, there are tons that are supported right out of the box without any additional driver, for example Wacom.
For any developers out there wanting to customize Bazzite to fit your particular use case, you can even easily fork the distro and build your own and still get auto-updates, with any additional device drivers, RPMs, and whatever else you want to fulfill your edge use case. Follow this link here.
