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!

  • HexagonSun@lemmy.zipEnglish
    13·
    5 hours ago

    I was using Endeavour, btw. Needed almost zero tinkering and was good to go straight away.

    But I run Linux on an ancient 2012 MacBook Pro, so eventually swapped over to Debian, btw.

    • thingsiplay@lemmy.ml
      2·
      1 hour ago

      Why did you change from Endeavour to Debian? Didn’t it work well on the MacBook you have? Just curious, no judging.

      • HexagonSun@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        14 minutes ago

        Endeavour worked totally fine, no issues whatsoever… or no issue where Debian does better at least.

        My 2 main reasons were:

        1. Ignorance over the point at which hardware components become so old and deprecated that bleeding edge updates might just break something one day. Couldn’t find a definitive answer, but I knew if Debian 13 works fine now it should still be working fine in 2 years. That Mac has outdated Intel/Nvidia graphics that have always been problematic on Linux, and many distros won’t even boot the live USB on it, so it felt like if any computer was ever going to spontaneously have a post-update issue it would probably be that one.

        2. Trying the give my ageing hardware the easiest ride in its senior years. The SSD is still original and approaching 14 years of pretty heavy use, so I thought to have it surviving as long as possible an OS that might only give 0-300MB of updates in a week would be a safer bet than an OS that would have many many more gigabytes of updates over a longer period of time.

        • thingsiplay@lemmy.ml
          1·
          3 minutes ago

          Thanks for the explanation. That reminds me an issue. I changed my default gamepad.

          At least one issue with EndeavourOS I had in the past (and that’s not an issue with the distribution, but with the model of having newest Kernel) was that the newest Kernel sometimes broke the driver for my gamepad, XBox One S proprietary dongle using medusalix xone driver from AUR to be specific. So I had to wait sometimes days or longer until the driver was updated in order to use the controller. This issue could be avoided when using an LTS Kernel instead, which is very easy to setup in EndeavourOS as it comes with such a GUI.

          Your given arguments makes lot of sense. So it is about stability (in the sense of not changing, not about bugs). So you seek a setup and forget installation, which is understandable and maybe would have preferred doing so too in your case.