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Goldilocks distro?

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which I need, I really don’t have the time or desire to maybe spend two days troubleshooting, and I’m a bit fed up with out of date pkgs.

lemmyvore ,

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.

atzanteol ,

Great question. Right up there with “what’s the best movie” or “which meal should I order”. Maybe you want to ask which editor is the best too?

Mr_Blott ,

The question starts with “What do you consider…”

You sound like the type to reply in threads where someone’s asking about a problem they’re having with Windows and say “I don’t have this problem because I use Linux (snort)”

gramgan ,

NixOS. Declarative system management is just so unbelievably simple and reliable that I couldn’t ever see myself going back to a traditional Linux system.

mesamunefire ,

Popos for me. It’s my daily driver.

A7thStone ,

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

turbowafflz ,

For me it’s either OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or Arch and I can never decide which. Tumbleweed having snapper and YaST everything out of the box is amazing but sometimes I miss the AUR, and Zypper is so much slower than Pacman. I also really like Fedora Silverblue on my laptop but I don’t think I could use it on my main system.

sunoc ,
@sunoc@sh.itjust.works avatar

Aeon Desktops it is

rebeltrouper ,

For me it was Gentoo. I am not sure what it is but for my work it just works better. Tests shows it runs faster for my work and comes with all the tools I need to compile things. I really like the package naming scheme and use flags. I also like the custom-ability of it as well. Tried arch and others but hated it. Also I think the documentation on Gentoo is insanely good.

JetpackJackson ,

My main distro is arch but I installed gentoo on a spare laptop and im really enjoying the granular control and the choices available, like if I want to use the binaries I can, or I can use a bunch of USE flags, it’s very nice. Emerge is slightly slower than pacman for me but I can live with that. I should learn to write some ebuilds though.

TheGrandNagus ,

Fedora. Installer is a bit rubbish (being replaced soon) but it’s not difficult.

In terms of speed, stability, and being up-to-date it’s been exceptional IMO.

Badabinski ,

For me, it's Arch for desktop usage. When I first started using Arch it would not have been Arch, but now it's Arch. The package manager has great ergonomics (not great discoverability, but great ergonomics), it's always up to date, I can get a system from USB to sway in ~20 minutes (probably be faster if I used the installer), it's fast because it doesn't enable many things by default, and it's honestly been the most reliable distro I've ever used. I used to use OpenSUSE ~10 years ago, and that broke more in one year than Arch has in ten.

I personally feel like Arch's unreliable nature has been overstated. Arch will give you the rope to hang yourself if you ask for it, but if you just read the emails (or use a helper that displays breaking changes when updating like paru) and merge your pacnews then you'll likely have a rock solid system.

Again, this is all just my opinion. It's easy for me to overlook or forget all of the pain and suffering I likely went through when learning how to Arch. I won't recommend it to you, but I'll happily say how much I've come to enjoy using it.

Kongar ,

For me I find endeavoros to be the goat. I realized that when I install arch and then the “essentials” for me - I basically recreated what endeavor does. Except endeavor does it with like three clicks on the installer. So now I just install endeavor. Gnome, nvidia drivers, pacdiff and meld, text editor, yay, you get the idea…. No bloat, no bs, quick install with exactly what I would do manually with arch.

I also know this take is controversial-but I like flatpaks as well. Sometimes you gotta mess with flatseal, and sometimes the AUR package is clearly superior. But they usually get the job done well.

It’s nearly impossible to break arch if you use the AUR as little as possible AND read the arch homepage for manual steps BEFORE doing an upgrade.

Thorned_Rose ,
@Thorned_Rose@sh.itjust.works avatar

I’m a long time Arch user (10 years) and I love EndeavourOS + Pamac (from Manjaro) as a simple install that I can easily maintain on family members computers or on our Laptop if I’m feeling lazy.

ugo ,

+1. Arch is super easy to install, just open the install guide on the wiki and do what it says.

It’s also really stable nowadays, I can’t actually remember the last time something broke.

As a counterpoint, on ubuntu I constantly had weird issues where the system would change something apparently on its own. Like the key repeat resetting every so often (I mean multiple times an hour), weirdness with graphic drivers, and so on.

That said, I also appreciate debian for server usage. Getting security updates only can be desirable for something that should be little more than an appliance. Doing a dist upgrade scares the shit out of me though, while on arch that’s not even close to a concern.

Hack3900 ,

Arch at home debian on the server is a great experience

D_Air1 ,
@D_Air1@lemmy.ml avatar

I agree. Arch really won me over with how they do things. Sometimes less is more.

  1. Not splitting packages as much means that I can compile pretty much any program without thinking about dependencies most of the time.
  2. Arch doesn’t autostart programs just because I downloaded them.
  3. While I’m not necessarily attached to having the latest and greatest of every package. There are often times where I do want the latest and greatest of some package and it was out of date on point release distributions. (Before someone comments flatpak. The most important collection of software I want up to date is the Desktop Environemnt and my Desktop Environment of choice is KDE Plasma.)
  4. Lastly, the pkgbuild format is dead simple and I have actually managed to roll my own packages compared to some other distros.
Meltrax ,

Fedora. Silverblue if you want even more stability.

Only_Exception ,
@Only_Exception@mstdn.plus avatar

@elucubra linux mint was my goldilocks for a while. Had to get through some major driver issues before it was stable but I loved it. Very recently moved to fedora because I wanted the latest updates without being on a edge distro

ParadeDuGrotesque ,
@ParadeDuGrotesque@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Slackware.

It. Just. Works.

elucubra OP , (edited )

Slackware was my first distro, in the 90s, installed from diskettes, downloaded with a 9600 baud modem, FUN! (actually it was, wizard stuff at the time). I moved to Mandrake I think, then RH or another, and whenever I took a look at Slackware, it felt ancient when compared with these “glitzy”, for the time, distros. Maybe I should take a look again.

blackbrook ,

I haven’t tried slackware in some years, but doesn’t it require not minding that the version of everything be way dated? OP said “up to date”.

amanneedsamaid ,

Fedora. Specifically I’ve been using Silverblue recently, very stable system for me.

c0smokram3r ,
@c0smokram3r@midwest.social avatar

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