During the first impressions of said distro, what feature surprised you the most?
Arch Linux. Everyone said it was hard to use, unstable, etc. but my experience with it has been the exact opposite.
Yes, the install process is needlessly complicated (although it got a lot simpler now that we have archinstall), but the OS itself is rock solid and rarely has any issues that require more than a reboot or a package reinstall to solve. The AUR is a godsend too if you don’t want or don’t know how to compile stuff from source.
Arch Linux has by far the best community, the support wiki is the most useful wiki to Linux there is, it basically covers everything. Mad props to the arch Linux community.
Agree, but mad props to the Gentoo people too. Nice community and incredible wiki as well.
I heard all the stability concerns when I first started using it. That was in 2008. It’s been my main distro ever since. Apart from 2 or 3 major changes over the years (eg, the infamous /usr/lib migration) it’s been rock solid and very up to date
Yeah I feel like even if arch is a little easier to break than other distributions, it’s also way way easier to fix which basically cancels it out.
I second this - for some reasons, my (almost) first distro was arch (first was a fedora for 3-4 days). Arch is great if you know what you are doing, you can have a lean mean compute machine
Manjaro, its a clean and simple way to install Arch with lots of good GUI for all the tasks a user needs to do on their system… Then it crash and bricked the install… 3 times.
Anyways I’m on Mint now.
Endeavour os was the great manjaro replacement for mw
Endeavour is Arch and Manjaro isn’t. Endeavour is not a replacement for Manjaro for that reason alone.
“I installed distro B over distro A” does not mean “distro B is a replacement for distro A”. They can be wildly different and it could be very misleading for someone looking for something that’s actually similar to distro A.
While I agree with you, what is attractive about Manjaro that you want that EOS does not offer?
I also tend to see EndoeavourOS as a great Manjaro replacement because what I want is a high-quality, opinionated, and easy to install no-nonsense distro that offers a massive repository of very up-to-date software in its repos.
I used to think Manjaro looked better but I installed it recently and I did not like it as much as the default EOS look. Perhaps I am just conditioned.
The only thing that stands out for me that people might prefer about Manjaro is the graphical package management. Of course, it is a one-time, one line command to install the very same package manager in EOS that Manjaro uses. Does that disqualify EOS as a Manjaro replacement?
First of all would be the fact that Endeavour is basically just an installer. It should have been an alternative offered by Arch alongside archinstall. I know it also offers some desktop setup but IMO that’s too little to qualify as a distro. You can replicate looks and themes fairly easily. Might as well install Arch.
…but I don’t want Arch because I’m at a point where I want my desktop distro to be boring and predictable, so it enables me to focus on other things. Arch needs more maintenance than I’m willing to put in. But I also want a rolling distro and having recent-enough packages.
Manjaro is a unique combination of rolling and stability. It’s that combo that’s the main factor but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I enjoy not having to ever think about the graphics drivers, or about the kernel, and it’s nice to have a graphical package manager.
As a sidenote, Garuda goes the extra mile and adds similar quality-of-life tools, while staying true to Arch repos. I think Garuda should get the publicity as an actual alternative in-between Arch and Manjaro, rather than Endeavour.
Ok I understand the technical reality you poin to, I just refer to the user experience. For a normal user, you probably won’t notice that technically manjaro is not arch and EOS is. IMHO Manjaro breaks a lot and EOS just works and needs less manteinance.
How long have you been using each of them? In my years-long experience it’s been the exact opposite. Manjaro goes out of its way to not break anything and offers safety measures out of the box to recover if something should break. Arch doesn’t care, it introduces breaking changes all the time and expects its users to be able to cope with them.
They target very different types of users and have very different goals. Manjaro explicitly tries to be stable and user-friendly whereas Arch exclusively caters to advanced users and aims to be customizable above all.
You can achieve the same with Arch that you get out of the box with Manjaro but it’s not there by default – because that’s not something a lot of Arch users are seeking.
For a normal user, you probably won’t notice that technically manjaro is not arch and EOS is.
What’s a “normal” user? On Linux you get all sorts. But you will most definitely notice a difference between daily driving Manjaro vs driving Arch.
I used manjaro for 3 years or so and then been using EOS for similar time. Manjaro broke a lot of times. EOS is more stable for me.
Sorry for my ignorance, Linux noob here, but what do you both mean by Manjaro isn’t Arch?
How did it crash?
Manjaro is a very opinionated distro and has a certain way of doing things. There’s also a lot of bad advice online that tells you to do exactly the things that will break it. Doing things like using an experimental kernel, switching to unstable branch, using Arch repos, installing graphical drivers outside its driver tool, installing critical packages from AUR, using Arch-specific config commands and so on.
Manjaro will work perfectly if you let it work the way it was designed, but lots of people don’t. Those people would be much better off using Arch or one of the Arch derivates that stay true to the way Arch does things.
Messing with Manjaro then complaining “it broke” is like using a toothbrush to slice bread and complaining it’s not working. Well, it’s the wrong tool for what you wanted, of course it won’t work.
For me it was installing apps from the AUR, like Intel Compute. Had dependency issues and errors every time other packages updated and when I tried to fix it, other modules would uninstall, and break my DE, or put my machine in an unrecoverable state.
It’s not as bad as that time my btfs file system broke randomly in Fedora, since I was able to recover my data. But it always felt like an endless battle with the distro to keep it going. Which is why I moved to mint.
I know it was a Manjaro issue since when I attempted to move to EndevorOS the issues were gone… though I dont like it as a distro (I.e. why isn’t a package manager gui installed by default)
I believe intel-compute-runtime is in the official packages, why install from AUR?
Can’t remember any more, either it was installed along side another package, or it was installed because of intel openCL support. Either way it’s been over a year since my last Manjaro install borked, and I’ve been running (and upgraded) Linux Mint.
So many distributions impressed me, but I think gentoo, nixos, Guix and Alpine impressed me most. Maybe Zorin with its beautiful design for newcomers.
If I had to pick one, it may be Alpine. The idea of having a fully usable OS with so little is really impressive. It even has a fully functional build system similar to Arch’s ABS (on which the AUR is based)
Gentoo, nixos and Guix are really impressive and make computing a pleasant activity.
I have fond memories of doing Stage 1 gentoo installs. Not that I did them often, but what a great learning process.
my servers run alpine! it’s incredibly stable even for hobbiest use
Oh wow that’s awesome! With containers or on bare metal?
I run jellyfin on bare metal because it makes it easier to debug imo, but I do use docker for caddy and some other little applications (like a tomcat instance for example)
So the OS jellyfin runs on is Alpine?
yep!
Poke around with Caddy on bare metal Idk if it is something I was doing or just placebo from my head, but Caddy is a lot faster on bare than Docker in Alpine Tho the drawback is having to manually set-up logging if you need (otherwise g’luck with whatever it decides to throw at syslog)
interesting. I actually haven’t had any throughput issues yet but if I do I will definitely keep that in mind
Garuda Linux hands down. Arch at its core but has just enough hand-holding for me to be comfortable and able to do most things via a GUI out-of-the-box.
I might not have made the switch when I did if I hadn’t found this distro.
Bazzite for an honorable mention, running it on my laptop and recently had some update troubles as it hadn’t been booted up in a while and ended up rebasing to the newest image (and discovered there was a specific image for Asus laptops with nvidia GPUs). The rebasing process really WOW’ed me…
I’m a bazzite user coming from silverblue, Jorge and the team have really done a great job when you think how daunting silverblue can be at first but how accessible the I ublue projects are.
But I’ll add another point to Garruda because I completely miss judged it. Initially thought yup another edgy gamerz distro but their tools are awesome particularly the btrfs manager.
Debian. Since so many distros are based of it I always thought of it to be a stripped down, minimal and basic distro, but after daily driving for a year now in suprised how feature complete and pleasent it is out of the box with kde DE.
Yeah, I tried a variety of Debian based distros to start my Linux journey and but eventually just settled on Debian stable and haven’t looked back.
I was surprised, in a bad way, at how difficult it is to get any VNC running. I tried Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and base Debian, but couldn’t get any VNC working. The closest I got was with Debian, but it gave me a different desktop than what was coming out the video port to my monitor. I’d be interested in hearing if anyone has had better luck with anything.
x11vnc works a dream once you have a systemd service running it on boot, but that rules Wayland out.
You may be able to get similar results by explicitly instructing the others to share display :0, otherwise they default to starting new sessions.X11vnc works like a dream on X11, couldnt agree more.
There is wayvnc for Wayland supposedly to solve the same problem, but I havent tried it myself yet
I’ve taken a couple of pokes at it with no results. I’ll just have to sit down with it some day and figure it out.
I can’t remember if I have Wayland on my Debian installation with XFCE. I installed it several months ago, so I will check.
Use Remmina on the client and then install anything that opens and listens to VNC ports. For example TightVNC or RealVNC.
Just even a small sys admin tip for Android phones
- For VNC - AVNC
- For SSH - ConnectBot
Arch Linux, they have the aur and it has every softwares I ever wanted for my computing needs that isn’t easily obtainable on other distros, on Arch Linux I don’t have to rely on flatpaks, Ubuntu store or appimages
Manjaro is the only distro I’ve tried whose live image worked flawlessly, out of the box, and did everything I could think of, first try.
Granted this was 5 years ago when I set down to find an alternative to Ubuntu. Maybe today there are more distros that can do that.
At the time I tried all the usual suspects that are supposed to provide a user-friendly, gamer-friendly desktop experience and they all came short — except one.
That sold me. And it was surprising because I didn’t really expect to find such a distro, I was just thinking I will make a list of what doesn’t work out of the box on each, and pick the one with the least stuff. I didn’t expect a distro to have no list.
Manjaro and Ubuntu surprised me how bad they are
Gentoo’s USE flags. <3
Puppy linux seems like its still one of the more unique Linuxes around. Its my go-to when I need to do a recovery for family/friends and seems to almost work with any system. If it can, it will load its entire system into the RAM and go to town. If it cant. then it will act like a live disk…but you can “save” the OS multiple different places. Its a fun little OS.
If you like Puppy, also have a look at Easyos. Created by Puppy’s orginal creator.
Ha. Was about to say the same. Running EasyOS on one ofy extra partitions for testing, and I end up using it as semi-daily driver often due to how light it is. Great on a USB key, too.
It is also somewhat unique, on top of other Puppy distros.
I ran Puppy as a daily driver for about a year before I finally got a new hard drive for that computer. It’s surprisingly robust for such a tiny footprint.
Tuxedo OS, as preinstalled on my Tuxedo machine. It is just a heavily tweaked Ubuntu flavor with Plasma as a default desktop and sane defaults (firefox not as a snap, but as a .deb file). Everything worked so well out of the box that I did not see the point in installing Arch. I also love the fact that Plasma is kept very much up to date. In comparison, Kubuntu 24.04 still has Plasma 5., whereas I currently run 6.1.4.
Guix System. The way that this distro keeps track of changes of the distro itself. The concept of having a store where everything you build is stored there with write protection. The fact that you can configure not only the system but every home environment to every detail but without having to deal with various configuration files that you keep track of it.
The fact that all builds are bit by bit reproducible. The extensibility you have in your system.
It’s the first distro I feel that nothing in your own OS instance is tied to any distro decisions.
The fact that you can have multiple versions of the same library without breaking the system.
It has a lot of things that I never thought it could be possible with a distro without going crazy about creating a very messy configuration.
I love it, but the configuration is messy. Many packages are out of date, but the Scheme syntax makes it easy to update them and build them on your system.
Problem is, getting these updates merged with the upstream never happens generally speaking (I have several open patches), so you end up having two working trees in your local Guix repo, and heaven forbid you run guix pull on the wrong branch.
I come from Debian stable so…
I’m currently ending the Guix manual. I want to add freetube and N64recompiled packages. Didn’t know it’s difficult to get patches or packages update to mainstream.
It’s a bit funny that the records that Guix uses are not the baseline records of the Guile api but modified ones. And the documentation in some low-level regards is scarce.
But using Guix opens up endless options and more importantly it helps you manage and learn how to setup operating systems.
the best resource in Guix is searching the irc logs or reaching out to their irc directly. The manual only gets you so far
The old Pardus, YALI was, and still is, the most awesome installer i’ve ever meet. Also Kaptan was amazing
openSUSE Tumbleweed, it’s jusr a solid distro altogether
I’ve run OpenSuSE and then Tumbleweed for a while (as in years, now) on a variety of devices (including nVidia) with no real issues. It’s been by far the most solid of the distributions I’ve used since I started using Linux in the '90s.