I would say Tumblewees is better than traditional Fedora.

But the lack of desktops, variants, adoption, as well as the lack of being able to reset a system, makes it less stable than Fedora Atomic Desktops.

Resetting is huge. You can revert to a bit-by-bit copy of the current upstream.

It is not complete at all, but already works as a daily driver. uBlue deals with almost all the edges that are left.

It's not even a compromise really, it's very up to date and very stable.

Pop OS is very much not a rolling release

Wait, Pop_OS switched to rolling release?

It also has YAST which is the best GUI based managment system on Linux

Semi-offtopic. Suse was my first distro 20 years ago and in those few months I had such a nightmarish experience with dependency hell in YAST and Yum, and such a contrastingly good experience with APT after I finally moved to Debian, that I have only ever used Debian and Ubuntu since then and I am still traumatized by the mere sight of the name YAST.

Silly but alas true! Of course I didn't understand anything back then and I'm sure YAST is much better these days.

Another upvote for Fedora. I tried SO many flavors over the years and every single one of them, while cool and neat up front eventually developed “something” that was too problematic.

So I asked for a recommendation with a very specific set of things that I needed from a distribution. Everybody told me to just stop messing around with different flavors and just go with plain old vanilla Fedora.

It has been rock solid and perfect in every way, and I no longer have that need to distrohop because I’m missing something.

+1 for Fedora. It is exactly what OP is asking for.

It also has the benefit of being able to apply the vast majority of Ubuntu tutorials, etc. since it's based on it. Plus it doesn't force you to use snaps for everything.

I'm running PopOS on a computer for wathing media at home. I'm not too impressed. I read a bunch of comment threads recommening it so I treid it out. They seem a bit unstable -- that at least falls in OP middle ground. I made an update and dpms management was just different, like the screen is no longer turning itself off. I've had some thing like this happen on it. It's not breakage, it's a bit annoying. "Just works"? Eh, sure, kinda'.

Or with Flatpak!

I wouldn't call them up to date but they are a little newer than Debian with the exception of Pop OS.

Yes somebody did mention Debian Sid, which is Debian unstable. Which is maybe even more up to date (I still don't consider it rolling release, because there will be a package freeze, if not multiple).

please do not use debian testing. it is not fit for production use and will give you headaches, especially when a new release starts approaching

Double this, nix has entirely changed my perspective on what I should expect from software and my operating system. It’s so rock solid and roll backs are easy. Reproduction with all the customization you could ever want with incredible transparency.

While I never saw the benefit (it is to complex) I do think it isn't a bad choice

Save yourself some trouble and run something for servers. You can even setup automatic updates with reboots so you can set it up and forget. I did that with a Debian machine and I forgot about it for a terrifyingly long time. It just auto updated and patched itself when new updates hit.

Both Ubuntu and mint are debian based.

Note, that it is still in experimental state.

They don’t package LTS kernels which is pretty concerning—especially if using out-of-kernel modules that don’t always get released in lock step that could leave you with a machine that won’t boot.

Having used the same Testing install since early 2022, I'd say it's not too bad. Stability-wise, I only have a major problem once a year.

Eventually, you get tired of having to switch to Flatpaks while packages transition. I'll either stay on Trixie when it goes to stable or reinstall. It's still an ext4 system and I want something different, as stable as ext4 is. I've been using btrfs on my new laptop for about a month and have been happy.

Honestly, in the age of Flatpaks, stable Debian is fine for most people in my opinion.

I don't get the down votes. This is a perfectly reasonable approach

This. (although I follow the directions here, which is a little more than apt install). The only thing I couldn't get on Debian stable is the latest gnome. But when I tried debian testing, it was slightly broken anyway. And gnome extensions could get most of the functionality missing in my older gnome version. Debian stable + flatpak + anaconda + adding repositories (like for firefox) is a perfect compromise.

What's nice about a stable distro is you can update the things you want to update, and your OS isn't constantly changing a million packages a week that you don't even know the function of.

Replace Arch with Ubuntu and the answer is yes. Arch based that's not a good idea.

The reason is that in 6 months lots can have changed, and Arch is not guaranteed a stable base, so updates might assume you have certain versions or things might break because you should have done a middle step during the upgrades that you didn't which is now buried in months of update news in the wiki.

If you want to only update your system every six months, Arch is not ideal, it's likely to work, but not guaranteed.

The issue with that is potentially keeping software which has security bugs on your system for longer than needed. Also, if you install new software you'll have a partial upgrade which can degrade your system. If you don't install anything though, your system should work as it currently does without issue. Unless a particular app takes something from the internet which may need the upgraded software (say, discord, spotify, etc. as they're electron based.)

If that's what you want to do I would suggest switching to xubuntu, mint xfce edition, DSL, etc. as they'll still patch security updates in. You do you though of course as with your stated usecase I can't see any functional issue. I don't see the reason for arch though.

This isn't what Arch is for. Get a stable system with reasonable updates. If you are really looking for stable go Debian but if you want newer packages with major updates every 6 months go Fedora.

Arch lacks consistency as they are constantly pushing the latest versions of everything. If you want that then that is fine but calling is stable is not really arcuate. They entire system is changing and updates are pushed weekly. You also can't setup automatic updates safely.

My thoughts exactly. It may take more time to set up (I, for example, never got my laptop speakers working when I installed it there), and it may not have as much hardware support (a shitty old HP pre-built was giving me ACPI errors and refusing to boot; and yes, I had updated the BIOS), but update-wise, it's super stable, but also quite up-to-date. It's not crazy (kernel updates take some time occasionally), but it's a great experience, and the inclusion of runit is fantastic. Hearty recommendation.

Really? There aren't updates with new features that you look forward to? Ever?

Ubuntu not only lacks some basic packages but they make apt install them with snap instead.

I would go Debian testing as it has a huge selection of apps and has good support for Flatpak (like pretty much all Linux as Flatpak is build on standard kernel components)

Several months ago I installed Tumbleweed on a VM just for kicks and giggles. A week later it refused to install updates at all due to some weird conflict, even though the system was vanilla to the goddamn wallpaper. In a week I try upgrading and magically the conflict is gone. I'll be honest, this was my only experience with Tumbleweed and it managed to have its update system broken in the meantime. I've never had anything close to this on Debian Unstable lol.

Not hating on Tumbleweed, on the contrary - I have been testing it for quite a while to see if it's as good as they say. But it doesn't look like a middle ground between Arch and Debian. At least in my short experience.

Arch pushes updates as they come with not much testing. This means you need to read before updating as it can break things. Pacman is also very fast at the cost of stability and ease of fixing

The downside with the Atomic variants is that ostree is much slower and takes additional storage and bandwidth. It isn't half bad if you are willing to reboot but it does add an additional layer of complexity.

So… it’s harder to maintain

I hate when people insist that Arch isn't easier to break. There was an incident a couple of years ago where a Grub update was rolled out that required that grub-mkconfig be re-run manually, and if you failed to do this the system would brick and you'd need to fix it in a recovery environment. This happened to my laptop while I was on vacation, and while I had luckily had the foresight to bring a flash drive full of ISOs, it was a real pain to fix.

Yes, Arch offers a lot more stability than people give it credit for, but it's still less reliable than the popular point-release distros like Fedora or Ubuntu, and there's not really any way around that with a rolling-release model. As someone who is at a point in life where I don't always have the time nor energy to deal with random breakage (however infrequently), having the extra peace of mind is nice.

or you could use a distro made by competent people and that actually serves the purpose Manjaro claims to have.

You really shouldn't go for Arch & derivatives if you don't want to fiddle with your system (the whole point of Arch & co) and really want stability (not that arch is that unstable tbh as long as you manage it proprely). Manjaro included. In fact especially manjaro since it manages to be less stable than Arch specifically because of their update policy. I mean why even be on Arch if you can't use the AUR and have the latest packages?

Aside from this and maybe a few others there isn't really a wrong distro to choose, better alternatives would be NixOS (stable), Fedora, Debian testing and probably several other distros that you probably should avoid for being one-man projects or stuff.

I wouldn't suggest Manjaro. On a theoretical basis the distro is a good one but in practice, and with the current management of the distro, It's one of few I'd say is a bad choice. They're destructive to the general linux ecosystem, often make incredibly wild and unnecessary errors stemming from the highest level, do not properly maintain their promise of delaying packages until they're fixed, and give bad info which can harm a user. Their devs also help propagate the "toxic linux" stereotype by being just that.

I'm gonna list off a few but manjarno has some more, with context. This will be written by memory too.

Please, skip to the header that's most important to you.

Harming the ecosystem

The first thing you'll likely hear is that they've DDOS'd the AUR twice, the exact same way through their Pamac GUI. Now, to be clear, this was not on purpose. They made a mistake. However, like quite a few other issues, they made this mistake twice showing they did nothing to stop it from happening twice. Something else which will become clear is that they don't do these things due to malice (usually) but shear incompetence.

Next, their lead arm dev, the guy in charge of arm development, changed a version on a library on asahi linux (an arm fork) known to break X11 in a change which had nothing to do with that library. This shows he did not try running his code beforehand. The only reason it wasn't checked by the larger project is due to the trust given to this, supposedly, high end dev. This after the company made a large campaign claiming that "Manjaro runs on the m1 macbook!" months before asahi was ready shipping some random build, not the latest or a set release, which only showed a black screen. To be clear, this could have broken people who tried to run it's hardware. This is in no way a forced error.

Delayed package promise broke

This will be a short header, but it's important. The promise of Manjaro is that they delay their packages two weeks. This, to ensure that any issues which arise can be caught and Manjaro can skip the bad version. However, this is not always the case. Quite often there's an issue in a library or package where they wait the allotted time and still ship. These are CVE's mostly and quite often have a fix out which manjaro won't ship until the two weeks are up.

Delaying packages is another problem in and of itself too if you're using the aur. What is the aur? Well, if you don't know you shouldn't be using it for one. The next header will discuss this issue

The AUR

The aur, the Arch User Repository, is a collection of scripts which install an application in many different ways. To be clear, this script can do anything on your PC as it's just arbitrary code. This is user submitted, meaning essentially anyone can upload a script to the aur including a person names anus kiss. This is a danger in many cases as we've seen before. For a fun example, anuskuss uploaded an update to the most popular wii emulators aur package which included two calls to an IP tracking website and a list of people who can "go fuck themselves" including homophobic comments and, if I remember, incel rage. The aur will also be where any malaware on linux is most likely to come from and to be distributed there first.

Luckily though, if you know how to read these scripts, it's mostly fine. However, manjaro places the button to enable it right next to enabling snaps and flatpaks. Both of which are perfectly safe to install if not safer than average packages. You need to be able to read the AUR package scripts to be safe.

Secondly, the AUR packages assume ARCH Linux. This means, when you install an aur app, it's assuming dependancies which may be up to two weeks out of date. Either that, or it'll install packages up to two weeks early. Now, if the first happens the AUR package risks breaking. Which is mostly fine. The latter though means system packages can fail. This is not good.

Sure, many people never have a problem with it, but that's not an excuse. This should be much more clear.

Bad info

Please don't use sudo pacman -Syyu to install packages. This will put a heavy load on the arch repositories for no benefit. Please, don't randomly install aur packages. The AUR break your system? Yeah, according to them you fucked up and it's all your fault. I'll admit this is all I can remember here.

Random points

Ever find a site and when you try and go to it firefox says a secure connection cannot be established? That's an expired or non existant SSL cert. They've let their SSL certificates run out 5 times. This is something you can update in less than 5 minutes, and can set up to update automatically in less than 10. It should not happen twice let alone 5 times. The first time they gave users a command to run in a terminal which set their time back in order to trick the system into thinking the cert was good.

Imma stop at this point. Way too long man, and it's way too early for me. I should probably save this somewhere to copy paste when someone suggests the distro

I'll throw in my vote for Manjaro because while it's not perfect, it hits all of OP's points nicely.

• arch based
• hard to break (but not impossible)
• biased a little towards Gnome but runs KDE and XFCE great too
• uses a curated rolling release

The last point is the most important. Rolling release means it updates regularly, so your packages will be mostly up to date. Curated means they do testing in an unstable repository. If an update breaks something, those changes aren't pushed to stable.

I ended up with it after trying other distros but having trouble with my nVidia card. Manjaro's MHWD tool installed their drivers easily (although slightly confusing with its unnecessary checkboxes) and more recently, I've upgraded to AMD and never had a single issue.

It's not perfect but almost every issue I've had was located between the keyboard and the chair.

I like manjaro. It has been my most consistent with my nvidia hardware.

Not gonna act like I'm an expert or anything but manjaros been great for me. Tried fedora, mint, Debian, garuda, endeavor, maybe some others forgetting