I’ve been running the same arch install for atleast 5 years… I honestly can’t recommend any other distro because I haven’t used many for a long enough period of time
I also used Arch for 5+ years and had very few issues. If you know what you’re doing, it’s not hard to keep it running stable.
I’m now on Tumbleweed and have even fewer issues.
But honestly, what’s wrong with stable distros? I recommend them by default because there’s far less chance for anything to go wrong day to day, and your only concern is at release time. I switched because I’m a developer and using the latest is better for me so I can test on the latest versions of things. I also prefer to fix things as I go instead of potentially lose a day to a release upgrade going sideways (happened twice, once with Ubuntu and again with Fedora).
Btw, Tumbleweed is great because it configures snapper by default, which let’s you roll back if an upgrade goes poorly. I’ve used it a few times over 2-3 years, mostly when my NVIDIA driver got mismatched from the kernel. I’m now on an AMD GPU and haven’t needed it since.
Ok its because of my trust on the fedora after redhat closing up their source code and making it paid and they’re adding telemetry in fedora 45 and up so that’s why i have left fedora
Redhat isn’t closing their source code – it’s open to customers. And unless you need to use RHEL for some reason, it shouldn’t have any impact. Fedora is upstream from Redhat, not the other way around.
The telemetry Fedora is adding is extremely sensible, and also opt-in. So not sure what the concern is there.
But regardless, that has nothing to do with rolling versus stable releases. There are plenty of other stable distributions not based on Fedora.
I’m not understanding why you’d prefer software that’s more likely to be buggy or broken for your gaming rig over a stable distribution. What’s the motivation?
Depends on your hardware – but to be blunt, that question alone tells me a rolling release would be a headache for you.
Have you Googled your hardware and “Fedora wifi drivers” to see if there’s a fix? Because that’s the sort of thing you’re likely to need to do with a rolling release as bleeding-edge drivers get pushed to your system and things stop working.
That’s what im going to use daily use anyway and for gaming as well but that because fedora doesn’t detect my wifi drivers at least opensuse slowroll is looking good for a backup os
As someone who used Arch for several years and has been on Tumbleweed for a few years now, life happens. I ran Arch on my laptop, desktop, and a server, and I could go weeks if not 1-2 months between actively using one of those. But when I do, I want the latest software.
So I now use Tumbleweed on my desktop and laptop and Leap on my server. Updates are no longer painful whether it’s been a week or a month. I also switched to AMD GPU, which further reduced my issues.
I think Arch is fine, Tumbleweed just fits my lifestyle more. I’ll probably move my server to MicroOS one of these days, probably when Leap 15.6 EOL is announced.
I have a work computer, Steam Deck, and video game console as well. Sometimes I just don’t get around to using my desktop PC or laptop.
I also have kids, and they use my computers more than I do (mostly Minecraft). But I don’t personally use them every day (usually 1-2x/week, if that), and I don’t run updates every time I use my computer. I do try to remember to update them once/week (usually Saturdays), but that doesn’t happen very consistently.
And then there are vacations and whatnot (e.g. we went on a family trip for 3 weeks last year). Life gets busy, and mine doesn’t revolve around my computers, my computers are merely tools I use to play games, work on personal projects, and sometimes watch shows.
I mean it’s not really rolling, but since this is Linux Gaming, I recommend checking out Nobara Linux. It’s a Fedora fork made by GloriousEggroll of the proton-GE fame. It’s the easiest Linux gaming experience I’ve had so far, at least with the non-modified Gnome version.
IMHO, you should avoid KDE – I’ve had nothing but bad experiences there – but if that’s your favourite poison go ahead.
Most Linux distributions are quite reliable, even rolling ones. What usually causes instability are the closed source applications people choose to run on them.
I’m not just pointing out nVidia drivers, I’ve seen Teams and Visual Studio Code crash an otherwise stable Ubuntu LTS.
If you want a desktop distro up to date with kernel, DE, etc. which does’t crash I can advice Fedora. Aftet the six month release cycle it is easy to update. I used it for a couple of years on my home pc and it was very good.
There are Nvidia drivers and steam in the nonfree repo (it’s a one command to get access to it), they are easy to install. I haven’t tried any gaming but don’t see why it wouldn’t be just as good as any other distro.
If your Arch breaks down it’s likely any rolling release distro will also, because it means you’re likely not doing part of the maintenance a rolling release needs, such as ensuring the config files you’ve changed get properly updated.
Any rolling release distro is unstable, because unstable doesn’t mean what you think it means, it means that any library can be updated.
That’s a fair point, but I think the definition of “breaking” tends to correlate with experience.
There are certain things that will “break” in Arch that are trivial to fix for me now, but were a real pain when I first started using it (GPG key errors come to mind).
Even things like the Grub issue from around a year ago – that’s something I could probably fix with a little reading now, but at the time I just ended up re-installing.
Fair. I used Arch when I was already quite familiar with Linux, so I really didn’t have any issues. I would just read the update notes before running updates, and the only one that gave me trouble was the switch to systemd some 5-10 years ago.
I have since switched to Tumbleweed because I wanted my server and desktop to use the same tools, but I want my server to run stable Linux. I use Leap on my servers and I’ll probably switch my server to MicroOS one of these days.
So far, Tumbleweed has been less of a pain than Arch, but that doesn’t mean Arch was unstable, it just required a little hand holding from time to time.
I love endeavour, really can’t go wrong with it. Is super lightweight, rolling-release, archbased (so you have AUR) and more robust than arch I’d say. It has never failed me.
However, my dad’s endeavour system broke once, idk if it was because no maintenance or what… I guess no system is perfect.
@darkeox@NZV65572@Oha what is, nvidia or amd? amd does have raytracing, and nvidia has vulkan with proprietary drivers as far as I know, but maybe I'm missing context because my server didn't load all the thread
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