MX is also solid for older Nvidia cards. The installer tool picks patched drivers for you in case they are needed. This is mostly up to preference, I don’t like CachyOS as much as I don’t like the rolling release model.

automatic hardware detection

I don’t understand that point at all. How is Arch different in that regard & I’m asking this as an experienced Linux user managing multiple Debian & Arch boxes.

So I wanted to hear some experiences of you, that you may have had in the past considering EndeavourOS, CachyOS, Manjaro and Arch itself.

If you want to go down this road & are confident in your technical ability & mental fortitude to maintain such a system long term, then just go with vanilla Arch & go through the installation process once. The real difficulty of Arch is dealing with the every day minor & major breakages that come with updates. Learning something from the install procedure is actually helpful with that. The main point is that not only is the real difficulty maintenance, but none of the popular Arch flavors do anything meaningful to help with that. It’s just you and the terminal at the end of the day. Saving a couple hours on the install process is not going to help you at all.

Manjaro is conceptually garbage ran by incompetent people so it’s not even worth considering.

I personally have gone for Manjaro now, kind of hoping that it won’t break on the attempt to cut themselves of the company side of Manjaro and becomming they’re own non-profit.

Oh okay, oof. Let me explain then. Their concept of holding back packages by one week & still having / advertising the AUR means additional instability. This or that library or dependency gets an update & then the updated AUR package will break with your one week old stuff. Furthermore far more often than not they still push the broken package, because they would need a similar contributor base to main Arch to actually vet & test everything which they’ll never have no matter what they do. What they call an additional safety net is almost never one. Sure if Arch pushed a broken grub update, that’s like the one thing you could a avoid with Manjaro, but if you cannot fix / research such a problem (chroot or refind & reinstall grub), then you have no business using such a distro to begin with.

CachyOS is in a weird spot, but I cannot really recommend them, because they push new kernels too soon, to the point of ridiculousness.

EoS is vanilla Arch with a gui installer basically. It’s barely a distro, but their community forums are great for new users to ask “dumb” questions. I can fully recommend every noob Arch user this community, they’ll help you even if you are not using EoS, they’ve certainly helped & taught me a lot back then.

Garuda is the same as EoS, but there is some added graphical flare, which you can add yourself to any Linux system if you wanted to.

If you are a new user who is worried about old packages, then you should be using Fedora, that’s pretty much it. Arch can be good too, but it’s for a technical user who is really interested in Linux beyond just using their computer.

Ill put it this way; me and a mate switched to Linux as our main drivers at roughly the same time. Both of us have a background in development (him more), I switched to Fedora, he to Cachy.

It is now roughly two years later. He has switched his distro multiple more times. Im still on Fedora because it just works.

Arch based distros are for tinkerers and customisers. Sure it can just work too, but if you dont tinker then theres no real point/ advantage.

I’ll advice you to go with Fedora, because rolling release distro often cause issues, but Fedora has not too old packages like Debian and gets major updates 2x a year, don’t worry about driver and app updates you’ll get them as you would on amy distro.

manjaro had a lot of issues with stuff as basic as their certificate.

i wouldn’t trust them over endeavour or cachy and i’ve personally had a good experience on both of these.

I’ve been using cachyos for a couple years and had no issues with it. For me it has enough ‘out of the box’ functionality to jump in, but also allows you do do whatever you want to customize it. I will always recommend it to people who have at least a bit of tech knowledge and just want to get started and not have to build everything from scratch.

I switched from EndeavourOS to OpenSUSE tumbleweed.

Not because EOS is bad, the contrary, i had a really good and smooth experience and probably only had one big issue, but my fault for not searching through EOS’ forum xD, that caused a total wipe and fresh install.

EOS beeing arch based, you need to keep regularly your system up to date and keep your system clean ! Beeing bleeding edge is a double sword… That’s why I switched to openSUSE TW, cause I needed something close to bleeding endge but also very stable for a hybrid server-gaming system.

This is also doable with EOS, but there’s way more personal investement to keep it stable.

Would totally recommend EOS to someone who want to tinker and customize his/her system and learning a bit more about how UNIX system works on a deeper level.

I personally have gone for Manjaro

Why would anyone intentionally do that?

The whole Manjaro concept of delaying Arch updates by two weeks is bullshit, because they don’t actually use that time for additional tests or include fixes. They just ship exactly the same bugs 2 weeks later.

On top of this where Arch explicitly warns users about the AUR as unvetted community content and only lets you install AUR helpers manually (increasing the chance that people see the warning and think twice) Manjaro comes with their own AUR helper pre-installed. No warning, no nothing. Oh, and they use the unmodified AUR which is running under the assumption that you have an updated Arch system, not one weeks out-of-date. So welcome to breakages and dependency hell.

Said Manjaro-specific AUR helper also has ddos’ed the AUR on multiple occasions because they don’t seem to believe in testing.

Have I mentioned the –by now meme-worthy– fact that they are too stupid to not let their SSL certificates expire and unironically proposed setting your PC’s clock/date back as a solution?

Why Manjaro, though? Isn’t CachyOS way more popular these days? And for good reasons?

I first dove into Linux March 2020 with Mint. The next day the pandemic lockdowns started. I hadn’t heard about the pandemic at that point.

My internet was shut off a couple weeks later which made learning how to use Linux significantly more difficult. I had downloaded a wide variety of distro’s though and had plenty of time to try them out but only had the man pages to learn from, which don’t really make a lot of the connections I needed to get things working right on my computer, a Frankenstein’s monster which had a lot of quirks and was made from parts salvaged from the trash or donated out of pity by friends. Oh and the CPU was partially delidded by a tornado and still works like a champ to this day.

I went from Mint to various Ubuntu’s, played with a bunch of Puppy’s, didn’t care for Zorin or Fedora for unrelated reasons, almost settled on MX but messed something up, and long story short, I started using Manjaro KDE since September 2021 and have stuck with it. For my use case and equipment at the time, it just worked.

I’ve tried a few other distros, breifly, mostly in VM’s and almost changed to Open SUSE Tumbleweed but ultimately stuck with the Manjaro. There have been a few frustrations along the way but the issues stemmed more from my low-budget equipment, corrupt and incompetant internet service providers and incompetant and corrupt monitor and cable manufacturers, than anything Manjaro did and some of those problems were solved by their (mostly) friendly forum people.

I got lucky and managed to find a way to build a new computer since then, a fairly decent one for a home desktop in my opinion. I don’t foresee myself changing anytime soon. (New PC: AMD 7950XT; ASRock Taichi mobo; ASRock Radeon 6950 GPU; 128GB RAM)

I ran Manjaro for a few years. It worked mostly but I ran into issues sometimes on updates. Got tired of that so I moved to Fedoraworkstation and it’s been rock solid.

My Arch progression was like this:

Manjaro -> Arch -> endeavouros -> Garuda Linux

Garuda is awesome if you like Arch.

as a longtime fan of looking at other people dotfiles and trying different setups, NixOS speaks to me on a spiritual level. Its dotfiles for your hardware AND software, all contained beuatifully in one place 99% of the time, and thats by choice even! You dont even have to do that much declaratively if you dont want to. Tons of automation tools have been developed, theres appimage support, etc.

can get annoying the first time you have to setup your own flake for a small project that doesnt have one, but once you learn it it goes from a real roadblock to an occational annoyance that i can personally totally live with.

wouldnt reccommend it to a first timer unless theyre a special breed. Enough fundamentals dont follow most other linux systems that its definitely an added struggle if youre also trying to learn those.

if your idea of FUN is heavily insipired by Dwarf Fortress as mine is tho, its the best thing since sliced bread

Made the switch from Windows to Cachy back in February because Microslop is getting way too invanse and creepy for my liking, and I don’t see why I should be connected to the internet for programs as simple as Notepad. Its been a learning curve as someone who’s never used Linux before but I actually find great satisfaction in figuring out the challenges that arise, and I can usually have a local LLM I use walk me through the solution as an effective learning tool. As someone who uses their PC for a decent amount of gaming on a regular basis, it’s treated me well, and I find that it actually let’s my system run better without all the unnecessary fluff of modern iterations of Windows.

Just enable nvidias apt repository and get whatever drivers you need directly from the source.