MX is also solid for older Nvidia cards. The installer tool picks patched drivers for you in case they are needed. This is mostly up to preference, I don’t like CachyOS as much as I don’t like the rolling release model.

Ill put it this way; me and a mate switched to Linux as our main drivers at roughly the same time. Both of us have a background in development (him more), I switched to Fedora, he to Cachy.

It is now roughly two years later. He has switched his distro multiple more times. Im still on Fedora because it just works.

Arch based distros are for tinkerers and customisers.

I’ll advice you to go with Fedora, because rolling release distro often cause issues, but Fedora has not too old packages like Debian and gets major updates 2x a year, don’t worry about driver and app updates you’ll get them as you would on amy distro.

automatic hardware detection

I don’t understand that point at all. How is Arch different in that regard & I’m asking this as an experienced Linux user managing multiple Debian & Arch boxes.

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

If you want to go down this road & are confident in your technical ability & mental fortitude to maintain such a system long term, then just go with vanilla Arch & go through the installation process once. The real difficulty of Arch is dealing with the every day minor & major breakages that come with updates. Learning something from the install procedure is actually helpful with that. The main point is that not only is the real difficulty maintenance, but none of the popular Arch flavors do anything meaningful to help with that. It’s just you and the terminal at the end of the day. Saving a couple hours on the install process is not going to help you at all.

Manjaro is conceptually garbage ran by incompetent people so it’s not even worth considering.

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.

Oh okay, oof. Let me explain then. Their concept of holding back packages by one week & still having / advertising the AUR means additional instability. This or that library or dependency gets an update & then the updated AUR package will break with your one week old stuff. Furthermore far more often than not they still push the broken package, because they would need a similar contributor base to main Arch to actually vet & test everything which they’ll never have no matter what they do. What they call an additional safety net is almost never one. Sure if Arch pushed a broken grub update, that’s like the one thing you could survive with Manjaro, but if you cannot fix / research such a problem (chroot or refind & reinstall grub), then you have no business using such a distro to begin with.

CachyOS is in a weird spot, but I cannot really recommend them, because they push new kernels too soon, to the point of ridiculousness.

EoS is vanilla Arch with a gui installer basically. It’s barely a distro, but their community forums are great for new users to ask “dumb” questions. I can fully recommend every noob Arch user this community, they’ll help you even if you are not using EoS, they’ve certainly helped & taught me a lot back then.

Garuda is the same as EoS, but there is some added graphical flare, which you can add yourself to any Linux system if you wanted to.

If you are a new user who is worried about old packages, then you should be using Fedora, that’s pretty much it. Arch can be good too, but it’s for a technical user who is really interested in Linux beyond just using their computer.

I’m very sorry to inform you that arch 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 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.

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’.

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 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)

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 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.

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.

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.

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

My Arch progression was like this:

Manjaro -> Arch -> endeavouros -> Garuda Linux

Garuda is awesome if you like Arch.