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!
I’ve had great success with Garuda Linux. I’m running the KDE “Mokka” version.
It’s quite opinionated, so be aware of that, but it’s been very reliable on my HP laptop (it even has hibernation support!) and the built-in apps are top notch.
Just be aware that Arch-based distros tend to shun things like Flatpaks in favor of their own repositories and the Arch User Repository (AUR), and there aren’t any friendly point and click app stores like KDE Discover or GNOME Software. You will have to install apps using the command line or tools like Octopi, which is great if you know exactly what you’re looking for, but terrible for app discovery.
Since I mostly use Flatpaks, I installed Bazaar. You can install Discover, but it only works for Flatpak.
I used to run Manjaro, but after it left two of my computers in an unbootable state after an upgrade a few years ago, I moved on.