Windows has been a thorn in my side for years. But ever since I started moved to Linux on my Laptop and swapping my professional software to a cross platform alternative, I've been dreaming on removing it from my SSD.
And as soon as I finish my last few projects, I can transition. (I want to do it now).
Trouble is which I danced my way across multiple amazing distros, I can't decide which one to land on since the one software I want to test, Davinci Resolve doesn't work on my Intel Powered Laptop. (curse you intel implementation of OpenCL).
So the opinions of those of you who've used Davinci Resolve, Unity/Godot, and/or FreeCAD. I want it to be stable with minimal down time on hardware with a AMD Ryzen 5 1600x and a RTX 3050. Here's the OS's I am looking at.
CentOS (alt Fedora)
- Pro: Recommended by Davinci Resolve for the OS, has good package manager GUI that separates Applications and System Software (DNF Dragon), Good support for multiple Desktop Environments I like. Game Support is excellent and about a few months behind arch.
- Con: When I last installed Fedora my OS Drives BTFS file system died a horrific and brutal death, losing all of my data. Can't have that. And I personally do not like DNF and how slow it makes updating and browsing packages.
Debain (alt Linux Mint DE)
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Pro: The most stable OS I've used, with a wide range of software support both officially in the distros package manager, or from developers own website. I am most familiar with this OS and APT
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Cons: Ancient packages which may cause issues with Davinci Resolve and Video Games. An over reliance on the terminal to fix simple problems (though this can be said for most linux distros). I personally don't like APT and how it manages the software.
EndevourOS (alt Manjaro)
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Pro: The most up to date OS, great for games with the AUR giving support for a lot of software which isn't available on other distros.
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Cons: Manjaro has died on me once, and is a hassle to setup right and keep up. EndevourOS has no Package Manager GUI, and is over reliant on the Terminal. Can't use pacman in a terminal the commands are confusing.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed
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Pro: Like Fedora but doesn't use DNF, good game support
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Cons: Software isn't as well supported.
Edit: from the sounds of thing, and the advice from everyone. I think what I’ll do is an install order while testing distros (either in distro box or on a spare ssd) in the following order.
Debain/Mint DE -> OpenSUSE -> EndevourOS -> CentOS
This list is mostly due to stability and support for nvidia drivers.
Manjaro should not even be considered in the modern distro landscape, the story of manjaro is just a series of incompetent mistakes.
While I have my own personal gripes with it, it’s has one of the most robust GUI configurations I’ve seen in any Linux distos. As someone who doesn’t want downtime having a gui for things like Kernel config and systemd, Manjaro has its perks.
Doesn’t outweigh breaking my build for touching AUR, but ther is a reason I consider it.
Sorry, but, no. Pretty much any distro can do all of that perfectly well, the fedoras of the world, the mints of the world, but they don't break constantly.
I have given manjaro to 3 people and used it myself for many years, i got sick of it because the team is incredibly incompetent and just breaks things all the time, i've switched to arch and all of these problems have gone away.
let me give you an example of a design flaw that has caused strife for every single person I have given manjaro, how the kernel is handled.
Manjaro does not let you sudo pacman -S linux, instead, you get linux with the version number as the package, this means for the standard user, your kernel will become outdated, unless you think to go out of your way to update it. This has broken every system of every normal person I have given manjaro at some point, and then i've had to go through GREAT lengths to resolve the issue for them, all of which I had to do from a terminal. Updating the kernel should be the default of any sane distro, and I have never encountered another distro that made this such a hassle by default.
https://github.com/arindas/manjarno
You can read this for other examples of how incompetent the team is, i'm sorry but there's just no usecase for manjaro, if you want a GUI, you should simply use something other than arch, like fedora. I see no advantages to manjaro over arch personally, but if you desperately need a GUI, just use something else instead of trying desperately to hack arch into something that it simply is not.
Manjaro takes the good things about arch, the KISS philosophy, throws that in the trash, adds nothing of value and breaks shit. Endeavoros is the same thing but better in every way, and arch even has an installer now.
Furthermore, if you're in need of a GUI, you're probably going to hate when manjaro finally does break and you're dropped in a terminal with no experience whatsoever, which will inevitably happen.
That's because you're trying to do things the Arch way. Manjaro is not Arch.
You have to stick to the stable branch and to LTS kernels. Which are installed by default btw so you don't have to do anything special, just not go out of your way to ruin it.
LTS kernels are supported for many years and receive constant updates. Debian does a similar thing, it sticks with a certain LTS kernel versions. Manjaro does one better and offers all the LTS versions from 4.x to 6.x.
You can switch to a non LTS kernel on Manjaro but they become EOL periodically and you have to watch for that and switch manually. You can do that but yes, at that point you're better off using Arch.
why would they not just use linux-lts then? that's still insanity. and eventually the LTS versions get out of date and you have the exact same problem just later, there's no need for this, just install both linux-lts and linux like arch does and it'll get out of the way, and you can easily fall back to linux-lts if something goes wrong, it's a much simpler system, versioning the packages completely defeats the purpose of updating your system. It's so much simpler than what you're describing and this is the distro that's supposed to be easier to use?
It's not Arch. It doesn't do things the way Arch does. It caters to people who don't ever want to think about what kernel version they run.
Here's what I consider simple. I install the distro. That's it, I'm done. I don't have to tinker with the kernel, or with drivers, or with anything. It just works.
And yes I realize that's complete nonsense to an Arch user, to whom tinkering with this stuff is the whole point. Which is why I keep saying, Manjaro is not Arch, stop bashing your head against the wall, you'll only hurt yourself and hate the experience.
That is exactly why it should do what I said, on arch I never have to think about this, on manjaro, you have to manually switch it out for no real reason.
Then endeavoros is simple and manjaro is absolutely not. Manjaro fails to "just work" literally constantly. Remember when linus tried to use it and a steam update uninstalled his DE? shit like this constantly happens manjaro side. It's a comedy of errors.
If you don't want to tinker at all, use fedora, it's exactly designed for your exact usecase. The problem isn't that manjaro doesn't do the things you're saying, it's that for everything you want, there is a significantly better choice than manjaro.
You don't have to switch anything. You get a LTS kernel when you install and can sit on it for many years. If you hit EOL on a LTS kernel it will switch it out for you. Manjaro currently ships a wide variety of LTS kernels that are under active support: 4.19, 5.4, 5.10, 5.15, 6.1 and 6.6.
But I don't want to use Fedora. Manjaro is a much better experience out of the box, and it's a much less opinionated distro.
That works great unless you have nvidia, in which case it will break terribly many times and you all of a sudden won't be able to install packages because you need to update desperately but nvidia conflicts with that version of the lts kernel
things like this happen all the time on manjaro, and have for years.
I found out that it worked this way, because it broke. Repeatedly. Across multiple machines, multiple times.
Then use mint or endeavoros, suggesting people use manjaro is suggesting a fundamentally broken experience. This is a distro that made steam uninstall your desktop environment. Their incompetence is genuinely incredible. How could you not notice that problem with your two week delay that clearly adds nothing?
If you want arch but with a two week delay that manages to make things less stable at worst, and accomplishes nothing at best, use manjaro, but if you want a system that never breaks, don't use manjaro, or arch, really.
What I don't understand about manjaro fundamentally is why on earth you would want a distro that does break, but isn't bleeding edge/minimal, the problem is that manjaro is supposed to be the "easy to use" edition of arch, but i've spent far more time doing maintenance on manjaro systems than arch systems, so what's the benefit? The GUI? If you're reliant on a GUI, I doubt you want a system that ever breaks, use debian, if that's too out of date for you, fedora, or mint, there's just not a set of desires that corresponds with manjaro being the best choice for you. If you don't want to switch because you're used to it, that's fine, it honestly doesn't matter, but we shouldn't be telling people to use it, or advertising it.
At this point you're just plain lying. There's no problem with Nvidia on Manjaro, it just works. I've had nothing but smooth upgrades. I don't know why you're lying but please stop.
I'm not lying and why would I? Your only remaining argument is that I must be lying?
https://www.google.com/search?q=nvidia+update+broken+manjaro
see the countless results for yourself.
Again this is a distro that shipped an update to steam that uninstalled your DE, why are you surprised it's a buggy mess?
You always take your chances when using AUR because it's basically completely unsupervised and anybody can put anything in there. What AUR packages were you trying to use?
Arch-based distros are not usually recommended to beginners for a reason. Manjaro tries to be more stable but you have to work within its proposed safety limits (use its helpers, stay on a LTS kernel, stay on the stable branch etc.) And AUR will always be AUR.
The hate is not justified IMHO. I've used Manjaro for 5 years now and never had any problems. It just works.
You have no idea what you're talking about. It's one of the better distros out there and it's popular for a reason. I wouldn't recommend it to a beginner but that's another story.
Just read about how they miss very important things time and time again, like they cannot learn from their mistakes. EndeavourOS is what Manjaro should be.
Making a stable distro out of Arch is a pretty difficult task. I think Manjaro is finally in a place where they achieved that goal but it was a rocky first few years. It also requires some cooperation from the user, if you do things like insist to use non-supported kernels or step out of the stable branch then it's not going to work well.
Endeavour has a less ambitious goal, it tries to improve on Arch with an installer and better defaults without changing how it works. It's not really comparable to Manjaro. I mean it's of course up to each person which approach they consider "should be" better but Endeavour and Manjaro are trying to do very different things and I think each has its place.
It's an ambitious goal without reason, just use fedora if you want a stable distro, why would you hack arch into something it simply isn't?
You realize their strategy for making it "stable" is just waiting two weeks and hoping it works? That isn't anything like what any good stable distro does.
The fact is, everything you're saying that you want the system to do, manjaro isn't even good at. And all the benefits you'd get from arch, manjaro ruins.
Either use endeavoros and enjoy the benefits of arch, or use fedora and enjoy a stable distro. Manjaro is neither and bad at both.
Standard release != stable. Fedora is closer to manjarno than to debian.
True, but it's still much more stable in the classical sense of unbreaking.
It's more stable in theory, but I've had bad luck with it. Nobara with Fedora 38 worked perfectly fine for the few months I used it. I installed Fedora 39 as a friend's first distro and it's still working without issues. For me 39 failed to boot after an update multiple times during the ~month I've used it, and there were constant small annoyances. For example it was rewriting journald entries for 5 mins almost every time it booted.
That's pretty Archy IMO. And that makes sense considering that it's only the second step in making a stable distro. Centos stream should be far closer to Debian, as it's basically Fedora LTS.
Fedora is all about being different nowadays, they're pushing all kinds of bleeding edge stuff and it's become an extremely opinionated distro. Which is fine if you vibe with what they're doing but makes it more complicated than "just use Fedora".
If we thought this way then most Linux distros out there wouldn't exist. "Why use [insert Debian derivative here]? Just use Debian."
I'm only going to say it one more time, Manjaro isn't Arch and doesn't have the same goals. If you want Arch, use Arch. It's not a zero-sum game, Arch doesn't lose anything by Manjaro existing, on the contrary, we all benefit from more distro diversity.
It is as simple as "just use fedora, or mint, or debian, or endeavoros, or arch" because guaranteed one of those will be better for your usecase than manjaro.
Actually, we do, manjaro is worse than one of those distros for every usecase, meaning manjaro just makes the ecosystem worse by existing, rather than better.
I understand manjaro isn't arch, but even if you don't want arch, there's something better in ONE of those distros for you, every time. Manjaro isn't the best at anything and it is the worst at a lot of things.
I have literally years of experience with the distro.
I have installed it for many people, and completely regretted it every time.
It doesn't sound like it's for you if it's doing things in a way that you find anti-productive and "wrong". Why continue using it then? At some point of course you'll end up resenting it.
I did stop using it??
Now if you could also stop bitching about it that would be great. It's obvious that you didn't understand the first thing about how it works and hated everything about it. Why live your life consumed by hate for a distro you don't even use anymore?
I've had all kinds of bad experiences with other distros, I don't go around constantly shitting on them. Especially since they could have very well improved since I stopped using them.
Negative feedback is important. The notion that people should only give positive feedback is harmful, and should be reconsidered.