Linux

I used Fedora, and am now leaving for the exact reason you're leaving Arch (plus IMO bad repos). Switched to openSUSE Tumbleweed a few months ago and am having a much better experience than with Fedora :D; I use the PC for programming, audio recording and mixing, document stuff, etc. (No gaming though).

Nobara is good but does break regularly, FYI... If you're a "power-user" I wouldn't recommend it as a daily driver.

There's also Void Linux, which hasn't ever broken on me due to an update, but is still a lot of work, due to its nature. It's actually quite stable though, and you might enjoy it, since it's quite similar to Arch and has very large repos.

I can't say much about immutable distros, as the only one I've used is bazzite, which was kinda horrible (broke constantly).

Well, I hope that helped. Good luck!

Set it and forget it, eh?

Any distro you like, as long as you stop futzing with it.

Seriously... they're breaking because you change things. Linux machines stay up for years without issue. Stop breaking the install.

use fedora. linus torvals uses it

OpenSuse Leap or even Tumbleweed. After getting the media codecs up and running, and remembering to set you firewall zone to "home", you're pretty golden.

I've been using Linux for more than a decade and distro hopped quite a bit. Mint used to be my happy place, but recently within the last 5 years or so I've been on Arch derivatives. Endeavour was never stable enough for my liking, but Manjaro has been great. I did have to go back to a snapshot once, fairly recently, but that was primary because I fecked it up and not due to an update.

You mentioned that you have tried several Arch-based distros, so I'm not sure if this includes Manjaro.

Could some of the instability issues you have on arch could come from what you are installing from AUR?

I use AUR for a few things and it is a great resource but the packages are maintained by users and can cause issues.

I update those packages carefully, remove them if I am no longer using them and reconsider which ones i actually need installed in the first place.

While doing this I have only had a handful of issues pop up while updating and usually there is a recent thread describing the issue and how to fix it after a quick search.

OpenSUSE Leap is the way to go my dude. It's been formulated by pedantic Germans and you can't go wrong with YAST/zypper for package management.

I never wanted a hobby, but rather an operating system. I've been using Pop! for over six years. I only had one stretch where I felt like I was chasing annoying bugs and I don't remember it clearly enough to remember how long it lasted.

Fedora. Ubuntu lost the crown.

If you want AUR specifically then you can only use Arch. That's the Arch package manager, and every distro has its own. Fedora has DNF, Debian/Ubuntu has apt...etc

Try blendOS. It's basically Arch but immutable. And SteamOS also exists.

Garuda is about the same.

Arch base, preconfigured for btrfs snapshots on Pacman updates (and they provide a handy garuda-update wrapper to that), many niceties already done for you.

I've used the snapshot feature a couple times and only because the Nvidia drivers botched something horribly and I went back to the same snapshot a couple times.

And I use distrobox (rootless podman FTW) for some crap too. Like that time I needed WebEx at a moment's notice for a call (and they only provide a deb and rpm). Or spur of the moment dev environments when I don't wanna futz around with vscode devcontainers.

But with arch-based stuff, you gotta read the Pacman output. If you don't wanna, definitely reconsider immutable. Next time I can be bothered to reinstall, that's where I'm headed. Heck, you can start a distrobox with Arch and install all the AUR shit you please without a major worry.