Hi, I was here and asked about a few distros already, so here’s a quick summary of my situation:
I’m thinking about what distro to put onto my new Laptop, which will be used for University, Work, and just general daily usage. I am currently using EndeavourOS on my main PC and have been decently satisfied, but I want to experiment more. I’ve already asked if Arch was fine for this situation, to which the answer was a general “Yes, but keep x in mind” and I’ve asked about NixOS, where the answer was generally a no.
I’ve been looking around a bit more, and now I’m kind of curious about Fedora, specifically the KDE spin (or i3, I haven’t quite decided). It seems to be cutting edge, compared to Arch’s (and by extension EndeavourOS’s) bleeding edge, and I’m wondering what you all think of it. From what I can gather it has basically all traits which people used to enjoy in Ubuntu, before Canonical dropped the ball on that. While it’s not rolling release, the stability improvements and user experience compared to something like Arch, or even a more comfortable fork like EndeavourOS, seem quite decent, but in your experience, does that make up for the lack of the AUR and reduced applicability of the Arch Wiki?
I’m curious to hear about your experiences and recommendations!
Edit: I feel like I need to clarify, I know about the difference between EndeavourOS and Arch, I mostly just brought it up as a note that I am somewhat familiar with arch-based systems, and as a question of if it’d be stupid to just go with raw Arch, as EndeavourOS is basically the same, but with a more comfortable installer. I should have specified that more clearly in the first place, my apologies.
Nothing beats the Arch wiki, to be honest. One of the best and broadest collections of useful information around the web. And since Arch is not-too-modified in relation to upstream, all of the information is usable for most a lot of other distributions, too.
And yes: I’m using Arch, btw.
To be more specific: I’m running Arch with Hyprland (a tiling compositor for Wayland) on my DELL XPS 13 without any issues, running Arch with Openbox (X11) on my main computer since over a decade without any major issues (device is used for gaming, multimedia, video and image editing and screen recording), and on all devices I serve something from.
Since I run Arch as a server (had it as communication server, as DHCP/DNS server, as VPN endpoint on a Raspberry Pi, and as a gaming server, currently on my main server it’s used as host for a Docker setup), I can tell you, you don’t need to worry about any real issues regarding stability and performance. Arch is way less bleeding edge as non-Arch users think. Just update regularly every 2-3 weeks at least, and check the news before doing so.
I’m curious to hear about your experiences and recommendations!
It boils down to what effort you want to put into it.
If university and work usage is mainly running productivity stuff like some type of text processing or using web-based applications you likely won’t ever have any issues. If you’re constantly switching environments, need to run specific apps (maybe even 32-bit software), constantly use different video outputs, tons of different BT devices, etc. … well … Arch is of course capable of everything the bigger distributions have to offer by default (all the nice “magic” stuff that happens automatically in the background), you just need to set everything up by yourself.
I might be biased towards Arch, but maybe just try if it fits your intended purpose and if you’re willing to set up everything at least once before using it.
I wonder how incompetent people who say Arch is unstable must be. It doesn’t even mean what they think it means. It just a way of saying you’ll get updates more frequently.
My vote would be Fedora, too. I’ve been hopping between distros for 16 years now. Funnily enough, I switched from Arch to Fedora.
And it just works, no broken dependencies or breaking a sweat when you forgot to update for two weeks.
If you can get used to the concept of an immutable file system (as discussed by @Guenther_Amanita) + flatpaks, it is really a smooth system without hassle. You should upgrade to the next version every 6 months - worked flawlessly for me the last two times (you should do backups before obviously).
Lack of AUR could be a thing - how much do you use it? I would say, that is the only weak point for Fedora regarding your requirements.
For me, it’s the perfect balance between recent packages , stability, and user experience.
Please let us know what you decided and why - I am curious to hear about your reasons!
After reading all this, and generally being predisposed towards Arch since my experience with EndeavourOS has been rather comfortable so far1, I’d say I’ve less been rationally convinced of using it, but rather not deterred enough. So I think I’ll just go with Arch, but make sure to keep my home folder in a separate partition, so I can bail if needed, with Fedora as my preferred backup.
1: Well, I say it’s been comfortable for me, and that’s true, but a friend of mine who installed EndeavourOS at the same time as me recently booted his pc up to find a terminal staring back at him. He says he didn’t do anything weird, and didn’t even update, but who knows. If I understood him correctly, reinstalling (one of) the Kernel(s) (I think he has two installed, one as a backup) fixed the issue. Problem is that this takes time, and when you’re not home, with shitty or possibly no wifi, that’s gonna be a big problem.
Cheers for letting me know!
if your comfortable with it, go for it -I think that’s the important part.
You should be good if you keep your system updated, a seperate home partition is a good idea.
In the end, we all use (GNU/)Linux. I think the differences are often exaggerated here. Sure, your package manager may vary but under the hood they tend to be quite similar (apart from being immutable or other special cases).
Have fun with Endeavour, fellow wanderer and thanks for the thread, it was a quite interesting read!
Arch and endeavor are the same aside from endeavors simplified installation and some apps. Both let you utilize AUR.
Fedora is good. I used it when I used to use gnome (I could use one more use of the word use). Switched to endeavor when I started using KDE.
I like having AUR. I haven’t had any update issues.
I’m sticking with endeavor for now. Fedora might be more ready out of the box though if you need regular use apps.
Use.
Fedora is indeed a pretty solid option its very stable and you are still up to date when it comes to packages.
One distro that I personally use and I’m going to shill is void. Its bleeding edge but its surprisingly stable. If you don’t mind reading documentation and researching similarly to arch you shouldn’t have a problem (since you are accustomed to endeavourOS).
I absolutely love void. Second to that I would say endeavour, it’s just arch with zfs, a wm and an installer.
If you’re interested in learning more try , I use oddlama’s installer. With binary packages, distrobox and flatpak, the small amount of compile time is a much smaller issue.
Alternatively, if you’re thinking about Fedora maybe play with Silverblue, it forces you to learn a bit of containerisation which is handy
I recently distro-hoped to Fedora Silverblue and I am quite pleased with it. This version has in immutable filesystem, thus you might want to look for another version of Fedora.
NixOS is big no go for me too, especially given that you can install the Nix package manager on any distro easily.
Arch Wiki is great and I often use it for non Arch distros well.
