so a common claim I see made is that arch is up to date than Debian but harder to maintain and easier to break. Is there a good sort of middle ground distro between the reliability of Debian and the up-to-date packages of arch?
so a common claim I see made is that arch is up to date than Debian but harder to maintain and easier to break. Is there a good sort of middle ground distro between the reliability of Debian and the up-to-date packages of arch?
Manjaro has been specifically designed to have fresh packages (sourced from Arch) but to be user friendly, long term stable, and provide as many features as possible out of the box.
It requires some compromises in order to achieve this, in particular it wants you to stick to its curated package repo and a LTS kernel and use it’s helper apps (package/kernel/driver manager) and update periodically. It won’t remain stable if you tinker with it.
You’ll get packages slower than Arch (depending on complexity, Plasma 6 took about two months, typically it’s about two weeks) but faster than Debian stable.
I’m running it as my main driver for gaming and work for about 5 years now and it’s been exactly what I wanted, a balanced mix of rolling and stable distro.
I’ve also given it to family members who are not computer savvy and it’s been basically zero maintenance on my part.
If it has one downside is that you really have to leave it alone to do its thing. In that regard it takes a special category of user to enjoy it — you have to either be an experienced user who knows to leave it alone or a very basic user who doesn’t know how to mess with it. The kind of enthusiastic Linux user who wants to tinker will make it fall apart and hate it, and they’d be happier on Arch or some of the other distros mentioned here.
or you could use a distro made by competent people and that actually serves the purpose Manjaro claims to have.
You really shouldn’t go for Arch & derivatives if you don’t want to fiddle with your system (the whole point of Arch & co) and really want stability (not that arch is that unstable tbh as long as you manage it proprely). Manjaro included. In fact especially manjaro since it manages to be less stable than Arch specifically because of their update policy. I mean why even be on Arch if you can’t use the AUR and have the latest packages?
Aside from this and maybe a few others there isn’t really a wrong distro to choose, better alternatives would be NixOS (stable), Fedora, Debian testing and probably several other distros that you probably should avoid for being one-man projects or stuff.