this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
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Goldilocks distro? (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by elucubra@sopuli.xyz to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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What do you consider to be the "Goldilocks" distro? the one that balances ease of install and use, up-to-date, stability, speed, etc... You get the idea.

I'm not a newb, these last few years I've lived in the Debian and derivatives side of things, but I've used RH, Slackware, Puppy :), and older stuff, like mandrake/mandriva and others. Never tried Suse or Arch, and while Nix looks appealing, I need something to put in production rapidly. I have tried Kinoite in a VM, but I couldn't install something (which I can't remember), and that turned me off.

Oh I'm on Mint right now, because lazy, but it's acting up with a couple of VMs, which I need, I really don't have the time or desire to maybe spend two days troubleshooting, and I'm a bit fed up with out of date pkgs.

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[–] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 1 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

If you're lazy (which I take to mean you like low maintenance) and haven't tried a rolling release distro, you need to try Manjaro. It's downstream of Arch (like Mint vs Debian) but with a lot of QoL improvements that take the edge off.

It's"Goldilocks" for me because it's rolling and has recent packages but also very low maintenance. I was sick of 3rd-party repo incompatibilies and update issues on Ubuntu.

It's a curated take on Arch in that it sources packages from Arch but holds them back until they're in a decent shape. Recent example was the Plasma 6 which they've held back a couple of months until most bugs had been cleared, but normally they release packages on a 2 week cycle.

It works out of the box, keeps working indefinitely (5 years going for me), and they have integrated system snapshots if you use BTRFS for root, just in case (automatically takes snapshots before every update, which you can restore from Grub). Never had to use a snapshot (did it only once to see if it works).

Limitations of Manjaro compared to Arch:

  • Not as bleeding edge due to holding packages for a while.
  • You have to stick to their way of doing stuff, like their tools for graphics drivers and kernel management.
  • You have to stick to a LTS kernel or at least keep one installed as backup at all times.
  • It won't change your kernel major version for you, ever. Some people see this as a disadvantage, personally I greatly prefer it.
  • You have to stick to their stable package repo. If you use their unstable/testing repos all bets are off (which is not going to be news to someone familiar with Debian).
  • You get access to the AUR but the usual warnings apply since AUR is even wilder than Sid. Some people say they've ran into trouble installing some AUR packages on Manjaro due to missing dependencies. It's never happened to me but I can see how it could happen due to the package delay.
  • You can't say "I use Arch btw". Arch fans tend to hate Manjaro because they see its limitations and hand-holding as antithetical to Arch's goals.

Regarding that last point, there's a very vocal minority that will smear Manjaro any chance they get All I can say is, try it for yourself.

[–] Quazatron@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago

I can confirm it works as advertised, has very low maintenance and good performance.

I use it for gaming with Steam, Heroic, Lutris and a bunch of emulators, web browsing, some light development and home lab.

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