I’ve been using Debian (and formerly Ubuntu) for many years.
But I’ve been wanting to tell people that I use Arch.
I’ve been considering the following distros:
- Arch
- Cachy
- Manjaro
- Any others?
I’m leaning towards Arch or Cachy. This is for a mediocre laptop that I’m planning to use as a media center: Kodi, Retroarch, Steam, etc. Should I even be using Arch for this? Maybe Debian is more stable…
Sorry if this has been asked before. Thanks for any tips!
But I’ve been wanting to tell people that I use Arch.
Biblically accurate arch user
Stay away from Manjaro.
I’ve heard great things about Endeavor and Cachy, but personally use Garuda. Highly recommend it.
Tried Manjaro for a few months before it broke. EndeavourOS has been treating me well for about a year now.
Same. Tried manjaro twice, fully broken after a few months every time. Thought Linux was just too much work and I wasn’t smart enough. Been on Garuda for over 3 years without issue.
I feel like manjaro keeps people from adopting Linux. I have friends that will argue about my Linux experience because they tried manjaro and think that’s how all Linux is.
Woah I used Garuda years ago and loved it at the time. Surprised it’s still going strong!
EndeavourOS is my first choice, CachyOS is my second choice.
EndeavorOS is my go to for arch based systems. But with the archinstall script I’d say just give vanilla a go
Cachy
Here, I fixed your post for you:
I’ve been wanting to tell people that I use Arch.
I’ve been considering the following distros:
- Arch
- Not Arch
- Not Arch
- Any others?
I’m leaning towards Arch or Not Arch.
EndeavourOS. It’s like Arch, but a bit easier with a few automation and gui stuff builtin. It’s still heavy on terminal usage and it comes light out of the box. I switched from Manjaro to EndeavourOS, because Manjaro gave me some problems (especially their package manager and because of the AUR too, and I didn’t like the maintainers, no further comment). It’s my daily driver for years now. I use it for everything, daily usage, little programming, gaming on Steam and especially RetroArch too. I’m a huge RetroArch fan. :-) So if you plan to use base Archlinux or Manjaro, then I can recommend to use EndeavourOS a lot.
Cachy OS is probably a good choice too, because their focus on performance optimizations. But they do also have a bit more, let’s say bloat, out of the box and their branding is a bit strong it seems. It’s a bit farther away from base Archlinux than EndeavourOS is.
Same, I use endeavorOS. Its just arch with a nice installer.
I was teaching a friend Linux, by ways of running through the manual Arch installation process and finally got to be on the other side of the ‘Ok, now that we’ve spent a ton of time doing this the hard way, here(endeavorOS) is how you use tools to do it in 3 seconds’.
Just plain Arch, been using it for the past 5 years. Haven’t told anyone unless askes though.
Same here, just plain Arch (BTW). I also don’t mention it IRL unless someone asks, and they never have lol.
i use cachyos, runs swimmingly for me. I’m not sure arch is good for your usecase tho.
Mediacenter/homeserver? I’d personally choose something like fedora, but debian sounds fine too
I used to be a diehard Fedora user and suggested it to everyone. Then they started allowing AI generated code, and I flipped. Moved to CachyOS on both my PC and Laptop, and they have been incredibly solid for about 3 months now.
I use cachyos on my homelab/media server, but that’s mostly because I’ve got more familiarity with it, which makes troubleshooting easier
Arch if you want to do the install completely by yourself and/or have some setup that can’t be replicated by the usual installers.
EndeavourOS/Cachy if you want a simple GUI installer for Arch, but you don’t get bragging rights.
Don’t use Manjaro
can someone who runs arch btw on weak hardware, like dual-core U-series i5 and such, tell me how they’re handling AUR and friends? every time I bring that up I get downvotes as if I’m some MICROS~1 agent paid to besmirch arch btw’s good name and whatnot…
the idea that I hafta build and compile shit on a puny dual-core in 2026 is fucking ludicrous to me, never mind the bloat and cruft from all the build tools and deps for every possible stack. so what obvious solution am I missing? like, how do you handle a full system upgrade, say you got like ten things from AUR in addition to regular packages, what does that look like?
One suggestion is to look for
-binversions of the packages you want. Those are precompiled and should install only marginally slower than a regular pacman package.first time I heard of this, thanks. so running it thusly it’s no different than a copr or apt repo?
Not quite as that its user-created and submitted.
But yeah lots of packages have a -bin counterpart that will install a lot quicker than compiling it for yourself.
You can use an AUR mirror repo to avoid compiling. Chaotic looks like the most popular one.
thanks, this looks good, gonna try it out with my next build
Back in 2015, I was using Arch on a single core Intel Atom 1.5GHz processor with 1GiB of RAM
Most packages came from binary packages, and the AUR was the exception when I needed something specific outside of the main repos
I use cachy os for the optimizations on modern hardware and access to newer packages. I use it on ny pc for gaming and laptop for development. I find it more convenient than arch. But I can’t say if it is better.
Manjaro is the best, but you’ll have to see it for yourself.
Don’t trust the “wisdom of the crowd.” It does not exist.
Yeah, none of that matters.
On the other hand, https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/tampered-linux-mint-iso-linked-on-official-website
Nobody mentions this because it’s not ‘cool’ and doesn’t make you fit in with losers/strangers on the internet.
All of it matters, hard disagree, even if none of them are individually that bad it shows an insane degree of incompetence
the linux mint thing happened one time and was resolved, it shows no history of being incompetent, that’s why it isn’t mentioned, it’s hardly worth mention, one security breach in the entire history of the project is not a big deal.
furthermore i personally don’t think mint is a good distro either so, whatever.
Most of that is pedantic. Its a solid distro with a sane out of the box configuration. However you shouldnt use the AUR on it unless you know what you’re doing.
Most of it speaks to their lack of competency. Issues like this are less frequent on arch and the whole point of this distro is that It’s supposed to be an easier arch.
it is in fact harder arch.
Its a small team and those are mistakes. We can find hundreds of examples of major companies with IT teams in the 100s making those same mistakes. The solution was figured out by the team and fixed. The original version of that GH page that most people remember was much longer but its been significantly reduced as most of the claims were disputed and the author had to reel back their claims or remove them outright. Now whats left is just a few pedantic complaints.
With arch they make those mistakes less but they shift a lot more configuration onto the user and when those mistakes get made they dont need to take any blame because it was the user who made the mistake. Arch has pushed updates that have broken bootloaders how many times? I’d consider that to be catastrophic failure on any distro except arch where i think its fine as the user should be able to fix their bootloader pretty easily.
Arch should not be used by beginners and hacking together a distro to make that happen was never a good idea. A team that cannot even figure out SSL certs should not have even attempted it.
So you basically hold them to a higher standard than google, apple, Microsoft, cisco, Amazon. Because theyve all had outages cause by certs expiring.
Its a common issue and its not a huge deal. The package manager cert was a big outage but their wiki website cert is the most minor shit ever.
Probably not a universal answer as you are optimizing for different things.
I will say that EndeavourOS is essentially vanilla Arch once installed. If you really love configuring everything yourself, vanilla Arch is what you are looking for. If you like Arch but just want to fire up a system with sensible defaults, EndeavourOS adds a lot of value without corrupting the purity of the base system.
So, my vote is for EndeavourOS.
Cachy adds the most additional functionality but also changes the base system the most. If you have a T2 MacBook, this is the best option for sure.
I would avoid Manjaro.
Garuda has fans. A bit much for me.
Do you use Arch?
Not currently but I have in the past.
Best Arch distro?
Just install vanilla Arch. If you don’t want to install it manually,
archinstallworks fine. But you really should install it manually, following the Installation Guide on the Arch Wiki, at least once.Don’t use Manjaro.
