I’ve been using Ubuntu as my daily driver for a good few years now. Unfortunately I don’t like the direction they seem to be heading.

I’ve also just ordered a new computer, so it seems like the best time to change over. While I’m sure it will start a heated debate, what variant would people recommend?

I’m not after a bleeding edge, do it all yourself OS it will be my daily driver, so don’t want to have to get elbow deep in configs every 5 minutes. My default would be to go back to Debian. However, I know the steam deck is arch based. With steam developing proton so hard, is it worth the additional learning curve to change to arch, or something else?

  • S410
    8•7 months ago

    I use Arch + Gnome with VRR patches on my main PC.

    It find it actually easier to use than e.g. fedora or ubuntu due to better documentation and way more available packages in the repos… With many, many more packages being in AUR!

    By installing all the stuff commonly found on other distros (and which many consider bloat), you’ll get basically the same thing as, well, any other distro. I have all the “bloat” like NetworkManager, Gnome, etc. which is known to work together very well and which tries to be smart and auto-configure a lot of stuff. Bloat it may be, but I am lazy~

    Personally, I think it’s better to stick to upstream distros whenever possible. For example Nobra, which is being recommended in this thread quite a lot, is maintained by a single person. In reality, it’s not much more than regular Fedora with a couple of tweaks and optimizations. Vast majority of those one could do themselves on the upstream distro and avoid being dependent that one person. It is a single point of failure. after all.

    • FubarberryEnglish
      3•7 months ago

      Honestly Arch (and the more pure Arch derivatives like Endeavour) is fantastic as long as things don’t break, and I’ve never had anything break that wasn’t more complicated than updating my mirror list or forcibly uninstalling a conflicting package. There’s always the potential for something more serious to go wrong, but having the Arch wiki is such a fantastic resource.