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
Why are you asking our opinion on the matter since you clearly have made up your mind already?
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.
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.
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.
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.
After Archinstall many derivatives lost their appel.
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)