So, few days ago I asked the thread which distro they'd recommend and one of the most recommended was debian and debian based. But I for myself(Even though the post says otherwise) now chose to use an arch based distro, because of the better supported and newer nvidia drivers as well as automatic hardware detection. So I wanted to hear some experiences of you, that you may have had in the past considering EndeavourOS, CachyOS, Manjaro and Arch itself. I personally have gone for Manjaro now, kind of hoping that it won't break on the attempt to cut themselves of the company side of Manjaro and becomming they're own non-profit.

Greetings,
Konke

With the advent of endeavor and cachy, I would argue there's zero point to using Manjaro. If you like the arch style and figure on reading updates to ensure things don't break, might as well be on a distro that's just arch nicely preconfigured with a nice installer.

Manjaro adds another later of complexity to that by holding some updates back for reasons, that as far as I've seen doesn't really do much in the way of helping stability.

Made the switch from Windows to Cachy back in February because Microslop is getting way too invanse and creepy for my liking, and I don't see why I should be connected to the internet for programs as simple as Notepad. Its been a learning curve as someone who's never used Linux before but I actually find great satisfaction in figuring out the challenges that arise, and I can usually have a local LLM I use walk me through the solution as an effective learning tool. As someone who uses their PC for a decent amount of gaming on a regular basis, it's treated me well, and I find that it actually let's my system run better without all the unnecessary fluff of modern iterations of Windows.

I used Arch for a couple years and enjoyed it. Occasionally an update would break the system but there was always a fix on the Arch forum. I found it quite easy to install and use, but I'm a long time Linux user, wouldn't recommend it to a beginner.

Used Manjaro, Endeavour and now on cachy. Manjaro delayed their updates for too long for me to the point that it didn’t even feel like it was based on Arch.

Endeavour broke to no return out of nowhere every 6 months or so. Have been running cachy closing on 3 years now and I won’t go anywhere. One SSD, one install that went through 3 computers.

I used Manjaro many years ago...close to a decade. It always worked for me even though I saw other complaining. Back then there was more fiddling you needed to do. I switched to fedora for a long while but wanted back to arch. I chose endeavor. I've been using endeavor for a couple years on my main laptop and I love it. Been working perfectly no issues. I think my next choice I will try cachy though. I have bazzite on a tv computer for steam and emulation but honestly I'd rather not have the steam deck mode and just use big picture when I want. Bazzite is a bit of a pain and I don't think I would do it again.

I personally have gone for Manjaro

Why would anyone intentionally do that?

The whole Manjaro concept of delaying Arch updates by two weeks is bullshit, because they don't actually use that time for additional tests or include fixes. They just ship exactly the same bugs 2 weeks later.

On top of this where Arch explicitly warns users about the AUR as unvetted community content and only lets you install AUR helpers manually (increasing the chance that people see the warning and think twice) Manjaro comes with their own AUR helper pre-installed. No warning, no nothing. Oh, and they use the unmodified AUR which is running under the assumption that you have an updated Arch system, not one weeks out-of-date. So welcome to breakages and dependency hell.

Said Manjaro-specific AUR helper also has ddos'ed the AUR on multiple occasions because they don't seem to believe in testing.

Have I mentioned the –by now meme-worthy– fact that they are too stupid to not let their SSL certificates expire and unironically proposed setting your PC's clock/date back as a solution?

I started with arch and moved to cachy a few years back. You don't need Linux experience, just computer literacy.

because of the better supported and newer nvidia drivers as well as automatic hardware detection

What?

I don't understand why arch users always say this... It's still Linux? You can install nvidia drivers on debian or fedora, and most of the rest are baked into the kernel (most of the time), so I don't get this.

Arch is the distro for people who don't know enough to realize all distros are basically the same but want to feel like they "know Linux" because they have to fix a bunch of stuff (spoiler: you can just read manuals of things without having your OS randomly break them)

Which distro would you recommend?

You can also set up debian to be a rolling release-based distro as well -- which is comically easy to do. (All you have is to edit a text file and swap a word for "sid".). And it's as stable as you'd think.

t. Running Armbian (which is "debian for arm pc's"), rolling release. Been running (and updating) it since a while and not a single weird oddities happened (like crashes, instability, etc).

I've been running Garuda for over a year and had a great experience. They include a toolbox app that collects and really simplifies lots of core functions like updating mirror lists or cleaning up orphaned packages, but you don't have to use it (I rarely do). It's been rock solid for me, no broken packages or updates the whole time I've used it. I'm running the dr460nized gaming spin, which adds several gaming-specific tweaks. The community is great, and I really have had no complaints. It is a little "opinionated," so you might fell like it's got stuff you don't need, but apart from that, it's definitely worth looking into.

I ran Manjaro for a few years. It worked mostly but I ran into issues sometimes on updates. Got tired of that so I moved to Fedoraworkstation and it’s been rock solid.

I used to use Arch. On x86 it was alright, the AUR was nice and the wiki is really good. When I switched to an ARM laptop they didn't have an official ARM version and at that time Arch Linux ARM was way behind on updates, so the Asahi Linux project switched to Fedora Workstation and I did the same. Now I use NixOS which I like much better than both Arch and Fedora.

I've used Manjaro daily for 8 years ans I haven't been able to fault them. I now also have an EndeavourOS system and it's also brilliant even though i don't like having updates that frequently.

They're both really good, pick one and don't look back.

Just enable nvidias apt repository and get whatever drivers you need directly from the source.

You change your computer more often than most people in this thread change their underwear

The only time I've ever had to fix a bunch of stuff was when I was new and neglegent in my first arch install. What's with all this mouth frothing tribalism? This bmost popular arch-based distros are essentially problem free and user friendly.

I've been on Cachy on my laptop and desktop and the only downtime I had was swapping from a Nvidia GPU to an AMD. Even then the process was well documented, easy, and risk free with snapshots.

"ARch Is tEH"... Blah blah blah say something useful.

MX Linux (debian-based), pre-install software to help you tedious things (installing nv drivers, disk manager, conky, etc), lot's of regular updates, the only downside is you have to reinstall the all OS when a new version gets out (it follows the debian release cycle with a 4-6 month delay).

Of course you can install them, but you need to do it. I didn't say that it would be complicated or not possible, I just said that I really appreciated Manjaro for shipping the nvidia proprietary driver directly at the start without any trouble. And I did not say that I chose Arch-based for the nvidia driver, but for the more up-to-date drivers.

most recommended was debian and debian based. But I for myself(Even though the post says otherwise) now chose to use an arch based distro

Why are you asking our opinion on the matter since you clearly have made up your mind already?

because of the better supported and newer nvidia drivers

Newer doesn't necessarily mean better, there's a reason other d'Ístria delay packages and it has to do with compatibility and finding early bugs.

as well as automatic hardware detection.

What? Debian based distros have automatic hardware detection, Arch expects you to know your hardware and install things accordingly. Hell, almost nothing in Arch is automatic.

So I wanted to hear some experiences of you, that you may have had in the past considering EndeavourOS, CachyOS, Manjaro and Arch itself.

I used Arch as my main distro for over 15 years, it's a great distro it has a lot of advantages in my book and it's still the distro I feel most at home with. But it's definitely NOT beginner friendly, you'll get the latest packages with the latest bugs and incompatibilities, sure you might get the latest performance gains, but that's when you're not facing the latest regressions in performance or in compatibility.

Don't get me wrong, I still love Arch and have it on some of my systems, but it's something that you have to know how to deal with.

I personally have gone for Manjaro now

If you must use Arch go with plain Arch. Manjaro and others essentially give you a pretty GUI installer, nothing more, and they cost you the customization of building your system from the ground up and knowing how to rebuild and fix if things go wrong for whatever reason (plus every Arch community will first ask what distro you're running, and if it's not pure Arch they won't even look at your post). Also worth mentioning, AUR packages are built for Arch, they might work on Manjaro or Cachy, but they might also not due to the slight version variations.

In short, I think Arch is a great system, but it has some difficulties attached to it that could potentially make it a problem for someone that wants something that "just works", which is what most new users want, whether they admit it or not.

Why Manjaro, though? Isn't CachyOS way more popular these days? And for good reasons?

I tried CachyOS as my intro to Arch based distros (excluding Steamdeck's Steam OS) and it kept crashing on start up a day after installation. I switched back to Nobara at the time and everything important worked again.

The lesson: don't blindly trust the hype because people are full of shit and omit a lot of issues they experience.

My Arch progression was like this:

Manjaro -> Arch -> endeavouros -> Garuda Linux

Garuda is awesome if you like Arch.

Why can't you just do a normal dist-upgrade with MX when it's Debian based?

CachyOS, EndeavourOS or plain arch.

local LLM I use walk me through the solution as an effective learning tool.

Which model do you use for that exactly?

Yup. Just this time. I had to. First one was my first ever pc build. I gave it to my son. Second one was killed by my basement's ungrounded electric. PC CPU died and motherboard. Thankfully saved the GPU. After grounding the basement, I had to kind of build a new PC where I replaced pretty much everything beside GPU. It was from an AMD AM4 to an Intel Ultra Core 270 Plus motherboard.

I usually keep things for too long, but these were all forced on me. lol

I think you can, but I never tried it on MX Linux. I do think that the MX Linux main page advice to reinstall.

as a longtime fan of looking at other people dotfiles and trying different setups, NixOS speaks to me on a spiritual level. Its dotfiles for your hardware AND software, all contained beuatifully in one place 99% of the time, and thats by choice even! You dont even have to do that much declaratively if you dont want to. Tons of automation tools have been developed, theres appimage support, etc.

can get annoying the first time you have to setup your own flake for a small project that doesnt have one, but once you learn it it goes from a real roadblock to an occational annoyance that i can personally totally live with.

wouldnt reccommend it to a first timer unless theyre a special breed. Enough fundamentals dont follow most other linux systems that its definitely an added struggle if youre also trying to learn those.

if your idea of FUN is heavily insipired by Dwarf Fortress as mine is tho, its the best thing since sliced bread

And I did not say that I chose Arch-based for the nvidia driver, but for the more up-to-date drivers.

But that's what I mean... It's not to do with being arch-based, but what the distribution chooses to ship. Bazzite is Fedora based and also ships with the almost-newest proprietary nvidia drivers.

For the record, I don't have an opinion on your choice of distro, use what works for you. I just see so commonly from arch users that they have access to the latest drivers, but that is true of anything running a recent Linux kernel. I was just wondering what about arch makes this belief so strong.

I've been daily driving linux-based OS for about a year and a half now.
I started with NixOS per the recommendation of a friend. It's great for stability and the config-based setup is super cool. I found the software to be a bit behind in updates and the way the nix store worked caused some hiccups with certain things I wanted to do. I still use it for my servers, but switched to CachyOS for my clients.

CachyOS has been great. I use the Shelly GUI to install all of the software. I have Nvidia (RTX 3080) and have had a really smooth experience. The one issue that sticks out to me is there seems to be an issue with switching from a single monitor setup (for sunshine streaming) back to my triple monitor setup including my 32:9 240hz monitor - this became an issue recently after some updates. Could be a KDE thing rather than CachyOS thing, though.

FWIW I know nothing about how to get regular arch working - I've heard it's a bit complex, but CachyOS has been anything but that.

After Archinstall many derivatives lost their appel.

i’d love to know more about the dead installs: endeavouros is just an installation wrapper and a few on-demand helper apps, once it’s installed (and you disable the autostart welcome app) it’s “arch btw”

I've been using cachyos for a couple years and had no issues with it. For me it has enough 'out of the box' functionality to jump in, but also allows you do do whatever you want to customize it. I will always recommend it to people who have at least a bit of tech knowledge and just want to get started and not have to build everything from scratch.

You know the weirdest part? Arch used to have a TUI installer when I first migrated to it, it lost it at some point between 2009 and 2012 (since I discovered it didn't existed anymore on a laptop I bought in 2012. Weird that they redid an installer after all these years (and yeah, I know that technically pacstrap is an installer, but it doesn't do much)

I switched from EndeavourOS to OpenSUSE tumbleweed.

Not because EOS is bad, the contrary, i had a really good and smooth experience and probably only had one big issue, but my fault for not searching through EOS' forum xD, that caused a total wipe and fresh install.

EOS beeing arch based, you need to keep regularly your system up to date and keep your system clean ! Beeing bleeding edge is a double sword... That's why I switched to openSUSE TW, cause I needed something close to bleeding endge but also very stable for a hybrid server-gaming system.

This is also doable with EOS, but there's way more personal investement to keep it stable.

Would totally recommend EOS to someone who want to tinker and customize his/her system and learning a bit more about how UNIX system works on a deeper level.

manjaro had a lot of issues with stuff as basic as their certificate.

i wouldn't trust them over endeavour or cachy and i've personally had a good experience on both of these.

I first dove into Linux March 2020 with Mint. The next day the pandemic lockdowns started. I hadn't heard about the pandemic at that point.

My internet was shut off a couple weeks later which made learning how to use Linux significantly more difficult. I had downloaded a wide variety of distro's though and had plenty of time to try them out but only had the man pages to learn from, which don't really make a lot of the connections I needed to get things working right on my computer, a Frankenstein's monster which had a lot of quirks and was made from parts salvaged from the trash or donated out of pity by friends. Oh and the CPU was partially delidded by a tornado and still works like a champ to this day.

I went from Mint to various Ubuntu's, played with a bunch of Puppy's, didn't care for Zorin or Fedora for unrelated reasons, almost settled on MX but messed something up, and long story short, I started using Manjaro KDE since September 2021 and have stuck with it. For my use case and equipment at the time, it just worked.

I've tried a few other distros, breifly, mostly in VM's and almost changed to Open SUSE Tumbleweed but ultimately stuck with the Manjaro. There have been a few frustrations along the way but the issues stemmed more from my low-budget equipment, corrupt and incompetant internet service providers and incompetant and corrupt monitor and cable manufacturers, than anything Manjaro did and some of those problems were solved by their (mostly) friendly forum people.

I got lucky and managed to find a way to build a new computer since then, a fairly decent one for a home desktop in my opinion. I don't foresee myself changing anytime soon. (New PC: AMD 7950XT; ASRock Taichi mobo; ASRock Radeon 6950 GPU; 128GB RAM)

After leaving Bazzite I jumped to Garuda. It was easy and I haven't had any problems. Things run good. Gaming runs good. Pamac runs updates when I shut down. Is good.

I disagree, I wouldn't recommend Arch to someone new to Linux, they would probably struggle.

This thread is a testament to the same fault of soul that caused stack exchange's demise at the hands of LLMs. Because even though LLMs are trained on scrapped data from stack exchange, and Lemmy (this very threat too most probably), LLMs aren't snarky, demeaning and 'why are you stupid? this is clearly a stupid question'.

IMO, Manjaro mostly just convinces people "Linux isn't ready" and sends them back to windows except for a select few gluttons for punishment.

Nothing against OpenSUSE tumbleweed, as I've heard great things, but I thought it was also rolling release, very similar to Arch...?

I love Garuda. I tried Bazzite and CachyOS, but I just keep ending up back on Garuda. I feel like it is the only one that really lets me just use my computer and not think about the OS when I don't want to.

I use both EndeavourOS and Debian stable and I love them both for different reasons. The main thing about these Arch distros is updates: You can't really tell what's a security update and what isn't, so you either end up updating and relogging/rebooting a lot or not doing updates and being vulnerable. I wrote a script and systemd timer to check for updates for certain software (like browsers) and do them without updating the rest of the system so I can then update the rest of the system more infrequently.

I think everyone needs to stop positioning Arch as something complicated. It’s not. Every Linux distro has nasty moments, and you’re better equipped to deal with them when you understand what’s happening. Perhaps that’s difficult concept for a newcomer (the idea that you need to understand what you’re doing, at least to some degree). But apart from the will to learn, there’s nothing really difficult and complicated in there. I had so many weird little moments with Fedora (which I assume should just mostly work out of the box), that if I had no knowledge Arch helped me to gain, I don’t know what would I do. I’ve consider migrating home shared computer from Fedora to Arch, and not doing it simply because it’s still mostly works on its own, and the Arch magic for me is in the customisations I have made. Fedora gave me unbootable system more times (with me doing nothing! Just updating) than Arch with me tinkering with basically everything all the time, that I won’t even say Arch is some complex mess. Rather the opposite, I think. That’s why I think scaring the newcomers away may be the wrong thing. It’s not too difficult if you’ve arrived to this point already. All you need is to accept you would learn along the way, and Arch (and the community!) would help.

I'm very sorry to inform you that arch manjaro is the worst of the three you mentioned. The distro is known to have stability issues on a regular basis so additional tinkering and fixing is required. Endeavour and Cachy are both excellent choices though, people here have reported that they're super stable.

I used to be on the same opinion but I've seen plenty of users here say endeavour and Cachy are struggle free unlike archinstall/arch manual.

Re-read my post, and tell me where did I said Arch is complicated? My view is summarized in the last paragraph, and I can summarize it even more here "good, but not beginner friendly". Arch expects you to know how to deal with it, it expects you to read the news, it expects you know how to downgrade a package and it expects you're comfortable in a terminal. A newcomer is unlikely to even know about any of that, they already have to learn a lot of other things like package manager, learning what's the name of each program and how they behave slightly different from what they're used to, etc, they don't need to learn about pacnew/pacsave files on top of all of that. If you're already comfortable in Linux, yeah, Arch is amazing, but if you're presented with a terminal not even knowing what KDE/Gnome are you're going to have a bad time.

And that's the thing, it's not that it's complicated, but it's the unknowns unknowns that will get a new user, they don't know they need a session manager, they don't know they need a printer daemon, etc. And if you bypass that by using Manjaro/Cachy, you're now in a position of using a distro that expects you to know about that but didn't taught you about them.