Hi, I was here and asked about a few distros already, so here’s a quick summary of my situation:

I’m thinking about what distro to put onto my new Laptop, which will be used for University, Work, and just general daily usage. I am currently using EndeavourOS on my main PC and have been decently satisfied, but I want to experiment more. I’ve already asked if Arch was fine for this situation, to which the answer was a general “Yes, but keep x in mind” and I’ve asked about NixOS, where the answer was generally a no.

I’ve been looking around a bit more, and now I’m kind of curious about Fedora, specifically the KDE spin (or i3, I haven’t quite decided). It seems to be cutting edge, compared to Arch’s (and by extension EndeavourOS’s) bleeding edge, and I’m wondering what you all think of it. From what I can gather it has basically all traits which people used to enjoy in Ubuntu, before Canonical dropped the ball on that. While it’s not rolling release, the stability improvements and user experience compared to something like Arch, or even a more comfortable fork like EndeavourOS, seem quite decent, but in your experience, does that make up for the lack of the AUR and reduced applicability of the Arch Wiki?

I’m curious to hear about your experiences and recommendations!

Edit: I feel like I need to clarify, I know about the difference between EndeavourOS and Arch, I mostly just brought it up as a note that I am somewhat familiar with arch-based systems, and as a question of if it’d be stupid to just go with raw Arch, as EndeavourOS is basically the same, but with a more comfortable installer. I should have specified that more clearly in the first place, my apologies.

  • @[email protected]
    4•10 months ago

    I think you want something boring. Boring, in terms of “it just works”, which is essential for school. You want to focus on learning, not troubleshooting.

    I’ve been looking around a bit more, and now I’m kind of curious about Fedora, specifically the KDE spin (or i3, I haven’t quite decided).

    Use Fedora Atomic (immutable versions of Workstation/ KDE spin, etc.). Especially uBlue. It’s a community edition on universal-blue.org, which features very vanilla images of Silverblue for example, but with some QoL-changes, many inofficial DEs/ TWMs, and much more.

    The cool thing is, you can just rebase to whatever spin you like, e.g. KDE and i3 and don’t need to decide. It’s like a reinstall, without actually loosing data.

    It’s also extremely robust (barely breakable) and in general doesn’t get in your way.

    While it’s not rolling release, the stability improvements and user experience compared to something like Arch, or even a more comfortable fork like EndeavourOS, seem quite decent

    It’s not only decent, it’s great! Everything “just werks™” and it’s very very reliable.
    In terms of stability (update schedule) it’s a great mix between very well tested, but not stale.
    I wouldn’t like to update daily like on Arch.

    but in your experience, does that make up for the lack of the AUR?

    The cool thing is, you don’t loose anything.
    I, for example, have an Arch container in Distrobox, and I use it all the time. I even have access to the AUR and all Arch packages on my image based Fedora install.
    This gives me bleeding edge software, especially for the terminal, without risking breaking my host OS. Arch seems to be too high maintenance for me, and I’m not willing to spend my time troubleshooting.