Whelp, here I am. Been an Arch user for over 10 years now, and to this date I love it. But something is bothering me lately. Almost two years ago I jumped ship and completely switched to Wayland (using Plasma first, then Sway). I tasted modernism with all its features and it was sweet. But those last two years were a timeframe where I had to troubleshoot quite a lot compared to before where I used XFCE which was a very stable and reliant experience.
I am at a stage in my life where I do not have the time, nor the energy anymore to troubleshoot problems on a regular basis. I am now almost afraid of installing updates, because something new could fail again. But I cannot go back anymore. Wayland is too sweet.
So although I still love Arch, maybe it is time for me to look for something else which gives me more ease-of-mind. I am specifically looking at immutable distros now since the concept seems to be exactly what I am looking for (stable, low maintenance, up-to-date packages, easy rollback). But I am a bit lost with the options and hope that you can help me with some recommendations.
- I mainly browse the web, watch movies, game, do some scripting and run qemu VMs
- I am comfortable with the terminal
- I don’t do fancy customizations
- I don’t like GNOME
Distributions that I find interesting so far:
- Aurora
- Bazzite
- NixOS
I am still trying to wrap my head around what the differences between NixOS and the other two are. Afaik, with Nix you can configure your system once (including what packages you want to use), save this configuration in a file, and load it up whenever I need to set it up again. And it seems to have the same concept of updates, such that you can easily roll back if needed. But it seems to be aimed more at professional users and that I might overshoot at what I was aiming for. So for someone who likes to setup a system once and then just wants to use it indefinitely without too much maintenance what would your recommendation/advice/critisism regarding my situation be?
Edit: thank you guys so much for all your recommendations and thoughts! After some further analysis I decided to install Bazzite for the following reasons:
- shares a lot of similarities with other Atomic distros
- but has all the nice gaming related things pre-installed and configured and it uses a properly pre-installed Steam (not the Flatpak version) (the main reason why I chose it over Aurora, which would have been my next best pick)
- my qemu virtual machines run perfectly fine (also the shared folder)
- some dev stuff already pre-installed (don’t think I need more than there already is)
- fast and the OS feels like made out of one block, very consistent
- I was ready to use my machine like I want to in basically no time
- I already love the atomic way of handling updates
- so far no issues
The only thing left for me to do is to figure out how to properly install SyncThing and Zerotier-One, then I am absolutely set.
I realize you’ve already made your switch, but I wanted to toss in my 2 cents. I had a very similar, though shorter term experience with Arch, and I still love it dearly, but over time some jank began to creep in around the edges. The time came to make some sort of change when I finally decided to wipe the windows boot drive I had in the system. I took the opportunity to upgrade the m.2 ssd and decided on NixOS for a handful of reasons, and it’s honestly been super refreshing. I feel even more in control of the stability of my system than any OS I’ve used before. If something is going wrong, it is most likely something I did in my config, or the config isn’t even valid and the system tells me exactly what is wrong before I even get to a point where I’m trying to boot into a broken system. I ignored a lot of the online recommendations to use flakes and home manager and whatever. Just a single text file with all the details of my system in it. I find it incredibly digestible compared to tracking down issues with Arch.
Anyway, I also have a Bazzite system, and like it. Sounds like you’ve found a nice new home!
Thank you for your input! NixOS sounds very intriguing to me but it also appears to be an absolute beast. I’d need time to dive into the Nix world, but I definitely will do so!
Yes, so far I am happy with it.
Thank you guys so much for all your recommendations and thoughts! After some further analysis I decided to install Bazzite for the following reasons:
- shares a lot of similarities with other Atomic distros
- but has all the nice gaming related things pre-installed and configured and it uses a properly pre-installed Steam (not the Flatpak version) (the main reason why I chose it over Aurora, which would have been my next best pick)
- my qemu virtual machines run perfectly fine (also the shared folder)
- some dev stuff already pre-installed (don’t think I need more than there already is)
- fast and the OS feels like made out of one block, very consistent
- I was ready to use my machine like I want to in basically no time
- I already love the atomic way of handling updates
- so far no issues
The only thing left for me to do is to figure out how to properly install SyncThing and Zerotier-One, then I am absolutely set.
I’m pretty sure I used SyncThing from Flatpak at one point and it run great
NixOS is not guaranteed not to break, but if it does breaks, you can roll back to a previous working version of your system, which is pretty cool. The question is: for you, is that worth the hassle of learning the Nix language to configure your system?
Maybe atomic distros like Fedora Silverblue and I forget the others ones could do what you want more easily?
Otherwise I’d say debian, if you want stable you’ll definitely get stable.
I think I will opt for one of the atomic distros like Bazzite or Aurora, since yes, it seems very interesting and a nice project, but learning Nix just to get eventually a working system running again won’t be the right thing for me. But I will definitely load it into a VM and try it out when I have more time at hands!
Take a look at blue-build.org. You create a recipe (not very difficult), that can be set to use a Fedora atomic distro like Aurora, Bazzite or Kinoite as a base, then add your own apps to the image it creates so they’re all installed along with the OS. It’s really solid and also supports rollbacks.
Oh, this sounds good! Thanks a lot!
Since OP mentioned that they used Plasma in the past and don’t like GNOME, it might be worth mentioning that KDE is developing their own OS which should be immutable.
Might have to wait for a little bit though.
For me, the endgame is Fedora. Your mileage may vary, however.
CachyOS - still in the arch environment but it somehow remains consistently stable
It is 90% arch, except for the few packages it has in it’s own repository. I have it on two pc’s and I have used arch for years I can not say it’s any different from a stability perspective. I almost never have issues on arch but also I wouldn’t recommend cachyos to anyone who had issues with arch. Couse I definitely had to remove custom packages just to fix dependency issues etc.
I second Cachy, been running this for almost a year now and nothing major has broken.
Thank you, haven’t heard of it yet, and will look into it!
Your problem isn’t Arch. It’s the fact that the Weyland experience is still under development and so not stable release to release.
This will be true on any distro.
If your solution is to freeze your distro in a certain point in time, don’t type
pacmananymore.Noooo that’s a terrible idea 😭
If six months from now you decide that you do need updates, Arch won’t like the accumulated six months of updates coming all at once and might throw a tantrum.
Also not updating is a bad idea in general, you do need security updates for stuff like your browser. Please don’t use an out of date system. If you want, install something like debian which will give you only critical updates that won’t break stuff until the next release.
But it still works!
Written on an hp compact from 1997 Running msdos
I wish :)
Well as long as you’re not connecting to the internet you should be fine 😅
Wait… can you actually connect to the internet with MS-DOS?..
The problem is with Arch. Not that it is by design bad, it is just that with software under heavy development will add new issues more easily, especially if you roll out updates very fast, which happens with a rolling distro. And like the other user already said: not updating your system is a bad idea.
Maybe try void linux? More diy and little bit harder cause of runit so u will learn how booting process works maybe, void is really stable but still rolling release
Void sounds interesting to tinker around with it but I don’t want to tinker anymore. It is fine for me to have a reasonable learning curve in the beginning, but I just want something that works once set up and that goes out of my way.
Additionally, Void is still a rolling release distro so the same downside to it applies to Arch and vice versa. Arch is not unstable per se, it just depends on the packages you are using.
I was thinking about blendOS at some point - it seemed like a decent proposition the best way to stick with arch, but have the declarative and atomic bits, without going to a new nix thing that sound like a more extreme nerd cult.
But I never did, I’m still mainly on Arch+XFCE or arch+kde, or debian+kde, or debian+xfce in my house.
I think I didn’t do it because I’ve never really heard of BlendOS , no established track record. No one ever recommends it. So it might not still be there in 5 years, so I’d have to be sure it’d all still work if the project ended. Meh, too much bother to figure that out.
If this promised deluge of PCs comes along soon i’ll maybe try it on a spare machine.
I think most people will say go fedora due to track record - but i never liked it when i last used it - a long time ago.
I also never stuck with Fedora but to be fair, this was several years ago. With the atomic versions, it really seems like a different discussion now.
I am also always skeptical at first with low track record distros, but will still have a look!
