this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Hi all, Relatively long time Linux user (2017 to be precise), and about two 3rds of that time has been on Arch and its derivatives.

Been running Endeavour OS for at least 2.5 years now. It's a solid distro until it's not. I'd go for months without a single issue then an update comes out of nowhere and just ruins everything to either no return, or just causes me to chase after a fix for hours, and sometimes days. I'm kinda getting tired of this trend of sudden and uncalled for issues.

It's like a hammer drops on you without you seeing it. I wish they were smaller issues, no, they're always major. Most of the time I'd just reinstall, and I hate that. It's so much work for me.

I set things the way I like them and then they're ruined, and the hunt begins. I have been wanting to switch for a long time, and I honestly have even been looking into some of those immutable distros (that's how much I don't want to be fixing my system.

I'm tired, I just want to use my system to get work done). I was also told that Nobara is really good (is it? Never tried it). My only hold back — and it's probably silly to some of you— is the AUR. I love it.

It's the most convenient thing ever, and possibly the main reason why I have stuck with Arch and its kids. Everything is there.

So, what do y'all recommend? I was once told by some kind soul to use an immutable distro and setup "distrobox" on it if I wanted the AUR.

I've never tried this "distrobox" thing (I can research it, no problem). I also game here and there and would like to squeeze as much performance as I can out of my PC (all AMD, BTW, and I only play single player games).

So, I don't know what to do. I need y'all's suggestions, please. I'll aggregate all of the suggestions and go through them and (hopefully) come up with something good for my sanity. Please suggest anything you think fits my situation. I don't care, I will 100% appreciate every single suggestion and look into it.

I'm planning to take it slow on the switch, and do a lot of research before switching. Unless my system shits the bed more than now then I don't know. I currently can't upgrade my system, as I wouldn't be able to log in after the update. It just fails to log in.

I had to restore a 10 days old snapshot to be able to get back into my damn desktop. I have already copied my whole home directory into another drive I have on my PC, so if shit hits the fan, I'll at least have my data. Help a tired brother out, please <3. Thank you so much in advance.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

Debian. Solid as a mountain.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I've had the same issues with Endeavour, sometimes you get buggy software and need to roll back. I do a full system backup once a week and update once or twice a day (I like updating frequently as it makes it obvious which package broke your system). When I get a bad package I just restore from backup but exclude /home. Then from there I install packages one at a time until I find that bad one and then just ignore it for a while. It really hasn't been too bad. I don't think you'll find anything like the AUR if you start distrohopping. Debian is the king of set it and forget it, but it might be a shock to go back older packages of everything.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Sounds so annoying to do honestly :/
I've just installed Nobara and will give it a whirl for a while and see how it goes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 minutes ago

It's the price of bleeding edge :) Hope you find what you're looking for in Nobara, my dude.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 12 hours ago

I have Fedora on my work laptop and vanilla Arch on my tinkering laptop.

I think instead of thinking about "set it and forget it", you might want to think about "if shit happens, how fast can I fix it?". That is because stuff break or there are bugs . If you use a very old and LTS distro, you might be comfortable but there might be bugs that do not get fixed until much later. Eg: Debian's kernel used to be able to suspend-then-hibernate, then they jump to one that cannot. So if you want that feature back, you need to wait.... until Debian catches up with mainline's fixes.

So if you only use your computer for web, email, movie. Then any distro will work.

Now, imo there are 2 types of problems in Linux:

  1. Boot/GRUB/partition problems: this can happen if you're dual boot, or a config goes wrong. To fix, usually you need to boot a live cd.

Pop OS would be #1 choice just because it has a "Recovery Partition" with live environment. You can reinstall the entire OS while you're on the plane, without wifi or any USB.

Arch would be #2 here, just because the arch iso is so good. It is minimal and has all the tools you need to fix stuff: partitions, wifi..etc. Plus, it boots in tty so it is faster for fixing.

  1. Problems with library mismatch: for this you want one with good snapshots built in. So OpenSUSE or if you know how to configure btrfs, maybe Fedora. I would still go Pop OS here, so you can configure btrfs AND get the recovery from point 1) above. Linux Mint would be #2 choice because they have timeshift built in.

So the TLDR for you is: pick Pop OS for the recovery partition. Also, use btrfs. Lastly, configure your disk nicely, i.e. dont do any crazy LVM encryption, just use standard layout so when comes the time to fix, it is easier.

[–] bund 5 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

tldr; look into fedora silverblue maybe ?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I did try an immutable one and ngl, I was a little stressed out using it. I wanted to create a package with the make command and for that I had to go through some hoops I didn't fully understand, and still couldn't get it to build.

[–] bund 1 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

hmm i’ll look into that also i read everything, and you should go with bazzite i think

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Bazzite download was showing 1.5 hours and kept failing to download 😂

[–] bund 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago

Lmfao. Exactly

[–] [email protected] 6 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I came here just for advertising Linux Mint once again. 👍

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

It's now a very strong candidate. I'm just testing cschy os for now, but I'm still leaving heavily towards mint. Do you use it?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I have used it many years now. Couldn’t be happier. I still have Windows lying on somewhere in the hard drive, but I haven’t booted it for a year or so.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago

Awesome. Thank you. I'm getting the run around between distros now to see which one works the best. So far Cachy os isn't as game ready as they claim. I had to install so much shit. Couldn't even boot into any of the Garuda ISOs that I've burned on the flash drive. Was very confused with immutable distros. Tried mint, and it was cool, but didn't try it for gaming. Man, this is a pain.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 15 hours ago

Solus OS is pretty stable

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago

Another Debian suggestion here, including for gaming and even VR. It basically just works.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Been using Linux almost 30 years, went from Redhat to everything else, and now I'm back on Redhat to stay. Fedora KDE for a nice, boring, up to date, and bulletproof OS.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

Definitely agree. The KDE spin used to have some quirks and bugs, but have been running it on my laptop as a daily driver for nearly six months with no real issues and it is rock solid reliable. Fedora also has a ton of community and commercial support so pretty much any Linux app will work fine on there.

[–] priapus 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

One of ublue's offerings are probably best. Immutability is great for resiliency and updates are easily rolled back if something were to go wrong. Bazzite is great for gaming, otherwise checkout Aurora and Bluefin.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I installed aurora and distrobox got me a bit confused, so it is now on the back burner until I read more about it.

[–] priapus 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

You probably won't need distrobox much unless you're a dev. Most packages will be available as a flatpak or in homebrew. You could also consider using Nix, which will most likely have every package you'd want.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

I wanted to build "ntfs-automount" from source and I wasn't able to do it on distrobox

[–] priapus 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

It should work fine, but you might have to manually install the udev rules after creating them in distrobox. Is there something you need that can't be accomplished with systemd.mount or editing /etc/fstab?

Bazzite docs also recommend this tool - media-automount-generator - which seems to accomplish a similar thing.y

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (9 children)

Debian stable. It's been here for 30 years, it's the largest community OS, it'll likely be here in 30 years (or until we destroy ourselves). Any derivative is subject to higher probability of additional issues, stoppage of development in the long run, etc.

If you're extra lazy, Ubuntu LTS with Ubuntu Pro (free) enabled. You could use that for 10 years (or until Canonical cancels it) before you need to upgrade. Ubuntu is the least risky alternative for boring operation since it's used in the enterprise and Canonical is profitable. The risk there is Canonical doing an IPO and Ubuntu going the way of tightening access like Red Hat did.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm in complete agreement with this post. Debian is pretty meticulous with their releases and Ubuntu LTS has a predictable release cadence if that's more important than "when it's ready"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

Also, whether you see it as a plus or minus, windows wsl defaults to Ubuntu. So, msoft also seems to be somewhat invested in them long term.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You want bazzite, for this usecase, disregard anyone who suggests something that isn't immutable, all of the immutable suggestions are valid, but if it's not immutable, it is huge downgrade for this usecase.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I'm leaning towards an immutable, but to be fully honest, they're a very, very new thing to me and understand nothing about them. Like when you give an idiot a grenade. That's me with an immutable distros. Lol
I need to learn more about them and how things work, because they do sound like what I'm looking for.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

with bazzite it's just regular fedora essentially except substitute the normal rpm commands for rpm-ostree and you're essentially golden

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

So, when you install things with rpm-ostree, will whatever I install stick, or will it be overridden whenever the system updates?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

It'll stick, but you're really meant to use flathub/flatpak to install things wherever possible, rpm-ostree is kindof a backup method.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I get that, but sometimes I need dependcies or packages that I can't get as flatpaks. Like today, I wanted to install a driver (or whatever it is) that's called "ntfs-automount" and it needs to be built from source with

sudo make install

And that I couldn't do on an immutable distro. And it is not available anywhere except the AUR and GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

if you can make an rpm you can install it with rpm-ostree like any other fedora based distro. Immutability doesn't prevent this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Awesome and good to know. I'm actually experimenting with distros to see where this takes me. I'm currently running Nobara with snapshots set up in grub. It also has other kernels entries in grub after big updates so you can roll back if things break.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, nobara and bazzite extremely similar, and snapshots are a decent workaround to not having immutability, but immutability is still a significant upgrade.

Although, i'm pretty sure what you're seeing only rolls back the kernel, not all of your modifications, so, you may still be screwed if you mess up. Is this worth worrying about? Probably not. But I see no reason not to just go with bazzite and have slightly more peace of mind in that .01% of situations.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

I've actually installed and enabled grub-btrfs. So now all of the snapshots that I make through timeshift will show in grub next to those kernel rollbacks. Also, I tried to download Bazzite today and the download was awfully slow it was showing 1.5 hours and then it fails the first 10 minutes every time. I gave up. I'm going to try to download it later and see

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Use distrobox brother, it is really underrated, I use it on my fedora PC so I can have access to the AUR all the time, you could even use Debian with it and have access the the AUR on a 2 year out of date install, seriously, it is really worth the effort of checking out, changed my Linux experience forever.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 hours ago

I use distrobox on my steam deck and i use it for work 😂

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Debian. I've had installations which went trough several major version upgrades, I've worked with 'set and forget' setups where someone originally installed Debian and I get my hands on it 3-5 years later to upgrade it and it just works. Sure, it might not be as fancy as some alternatives and some things may need manual tweaking here and there, but the thing just works and even on rare occasion something breaks you'll still have options to fix it assuming you're comfortable with plain old terminal.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago

A few paragraphs would do wonders for the legibility of your post.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Basically every distro is based on either arch or debian (some exceptions). I've been perfectly happy with debian, even as a gamer.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

I would say fedora silverblue. Have been using it for a while. All updates, app and os, are distributed via app center so reasonably foolproof.

And a benefit is that it has podman out of the box so you can run docker images without fiddling with the terminal.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

I put Fedora on a laptop as a whim almost 2 years ago.

My main computers are arch, but. I had an iso handy and hadn't used anything from based in years.

I am surprised at how quickly it gets updates. Gimp was at 3 before arch stable.

Anyways, I just keep updating the laptop and it just keeps working. I have yet to actually do anything for maintenance on it.

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