Whelp, here I am. Been an Arch user for over 10 years now, and to this date I love it. But something is bothering me lately. Almost two years ago I jumped ship and completely switched to Wayland (using Plasma first, then Sway). I tasted modernism with all its features and it was sweet. But those last two years were a timeframe where I had to troubleshoot quite a lot compared to before where I used XFCE which was a very stable and reliant experience.
I am at a stage in my life where I do not have the time, nor the energy anymore to troubleshoot problems on a regular basis. I am now almost afraid of installing updates, because something new could fail again. But I cannot go back anymore. Wayland is too sweet.
So although I still love Arch, maybe it is time for me to look for something else which gives me more ease-of-mind. I am specifically looking at immutable distros now since the concept seems to be exactly what I am looking for (stable, low maintenance, up-to-date packages, easy rollback). But I am a bit lost with the options and hope that you can help me with some recommendations.
- I mainly browse the web, watch movies, game, do some scripting and run qemu VMs
- I am comfortable with the terminal
- I don’t do fancy customizations
- I don’t like GNOME
Distributions that I find interesting so far:
- Aurora
- Bazzite
- NixOS
I am still trying to wrap my head around what the differences between NixOS and the other two are. Afaik, with Nix you can configure your system once (including what packages you want to use), save this configuration in a file, and load it up whenever I need to set it up again. And it seems to have the same concept of updates, such that you can easily roll back if needed. But it seems to be aimed more at professional users and that I might overshoot at what I was aiming for. So for someone who likes to setup a system once and then just wants to use it indefinitely without too much maintenance what would your recommendation/advice/critisism regarding my situation be?
Edit: thank you guys so much for all your recommendations and thoughts! After some further analysis I decided to install Bazzite for the following reasons:
- shares a lot of similarities with other Atomic distros
- but has all the nice gaming related things pre-installed and configured and it uses a properly pre-installed Steam (not the Flatpak version) (the main reason why I chose it over Aurora, which would have been my next best pick)
- my qemu virtual machines run perfectly fine (also the shared folder)
- some dev stuff already pre-installed (don’t think I need more than there already is)
- fast and the OS feels like made out of one block, very consistent
- I was ready to use my machine like I want to in basically no time
- I already love the atomic way of handling updates
- so far no issues
The only thing left for me to do is to figure out how to properly install SyncThing and Zerotier-One, then I am absolutely set.
I’ve been on endeavour+plasma over a year now.
I share your desire for a system that always, 100%, every time, is there and ready to be used.
At the same time, I really like arch and the convenience of the AUR.
Hence, I boot-strap reliability onto my system through btrfs snapshots.
The setup is extremely simple, (provided your install is grub+btrfs) just install timeshift + the auto-snap systemd services. Configure it, and forget it.
Next time something breaks, instead of spending time on troubleshooting, you timeshift back to a known good point and then just get on with using your system.
With the auto-snap package installed every update also creates a restore point to go back to before it.
In addition to that, I started updating my system less frequency. The logic being that the more often you update a rolling release install, the more likely you are to catch it at a time when something is wrong, before it is fixed. Still regularly, but instead of every other day, I now have an update notification that goes off once a week.
The result has been zero time spent troubleshooting my system. If it worked yesterday, it’ll work today. If it worked last week, but doesn’t today, I’m a reboot away from a known good snapshot.
This ready like an almost atomic distro, haha. Good job! Also sounds interesting, so definitely something that I will consider! Thank you very much for sharing!
The functionality is conceptually identical, yes.
And timeshift is by default set up such that only / is rolled back while /home is kept as-is.
So same as atomic distros, rolling back doesn’t mean going back in time in terms of personal files or settings.
So I’m really only missing out on the updates for something like Bazzite being potentially more reliable.
It’s funny, I update Endeavour daily because there’s less to go wrong at a given point
Oh, for sure. If you wait a month, the bigger update can be a lot more trouble.
But look at it like this. If a rolling distro has a problem once a week, which is fixed within 24 hours, updating daily guarantees you will run into it.
While updating weekly means your chance is only one in seven. Since because by the time you update, the fix is more likely to already be in the repos, so you’ll be jumping over the problematic update.
Hi, I’m about to install Timeshift on my clean EOS install. I used manjaro before and it used to snapshot before installing. Is that auto-snap the thing that does that and where does one get it from?
Thanks!
Yes.
Just do
yay timeshift, then install all three packages that show up.Timeshift itself is one, autosnap is a second, and the third is a systemd timer that handles the scheduled snaps (monthly, weekly, etc).
Thanks!
I had my first fuck up with openSUSE+Gnome a couple of weeks ago when impatient me killed my laptop in the middle of like 1600-updates. BRTFS was the only reason I didn’t rip my hair out and the primary reason I will be switching my daily driver gaming rig to Linux, finally! That FS is the tits!
Maybe one of the Fedora Atomic distros would be up your alley? https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/
I don’t think NixOS meets the bill. You’d be learning and troubleshooting a whole new language just to setup your system and modify the core configuration.
Thank you for your suggestion! Yes, NixOS seems a bit too much.
Atomic Kinoite really looks very similar to Aurora. Is there any benefit of one over another?
Aurora is going to come setup with things like non-free codecs, distrobox, rocm stuff. It’ll make life a bit simpler.
Sounds good! Bazzite seems to be very similar, just with more gaming related stuff pre-installed.
It’s all part of the same project, Universal Blue.
Aurora -desktop KDE
Bluefin - desktop Gnome
Bazzite - gaming and handheld focused with KDE
I installed Bazzite on a desktop I recently gave away to some local people. I also used Bazzite for two years as a htpc before I got a steam deck. It was good stuff, never had problems with it.
Is there a guide to all the different Universal Blue spins anywhere?
Their website has a rundown of each, links to each projects page, and notes on what makes ublue different.
But ignore all the “cloud native” talk. It’s got nothing to do with end user experience and I don’t know why they still feel the need to highlight it.
So from there I can see
- Aurora
- Bazzite
- Bluefin
- uCore
and then this link which has
- Silverblue
- Kinoite
- Sway Atomic
- Budgie Atomic
- Cosmic Atomic
Does that sound like all of them?
I think you’re fixing the wrong problem.
If your desktop was stable with X, and it’s unstable with Wayland, Why is Wayland “more sweet”?
I try Wayland about bi-yearly, and IME it’s slower, more buggy, and less complete. It may be inevitable, although I half expect a new Rust display server to come along and yank the rug from under it; it feels a lot like Upstart before systemd came along, including major distros having migrated already.
What about it do you find so compelling about Wayland?
Wayland is super fast, free of tearing and can handle completely different monitors working together without issues. It is not wayland that makes it unstable, just that there is much more going on development-wise which can cause things to break more easily in a rolling distro. But I also had issues non-related to wayland but with Plasma, for example that after a plasma (and Dolphin) update, my NTFS partition could not be mounted anymore. Using pcmanfm-qt solved it.
Having a distro that tests things more or at least makes it easy to rollback, would help in such situations. When I was a student, these things did not nother me to much. But now with a demanding job, I just don’t want to put too much time on this things anymore.
Wayland is super fast, free of tearing and can handle completely different monitors working together without issue
I had the opposite experience. Wayland was slower, and didn’t handle my different DPI and monitor sizes correctly; I could set the exact same fonts (family, sizes) in two different applications and one would be normal and the other unreadably small. I haven’t experienced tearing on X in decades; I haven’t seen that on Wayland, either, but it hasn’t been a issue for me.
I’ll try it again here pretty soon. It’s improving; my biggest issue was that people were pushing it while it was still clearly half-baked; maybe the issues I’ve seen are resolved. And, maybe it’s caught up to X in speed, although the last benchmark I saw (Phorix?) it still lagged X for many things.
Good resource, thanks
NixOS is not guaranteed not to break, but if it does breaks, you can roll back to a previous working version of your system, which is pretty cool. The question is: for you, is that worth the hassle of learning the Nix language to configure your system?
Maybe atomic distros like Fedora Silverblue and I forget the others ones could do what you want more easily?
Otherwise I’d say debian, if you want stable you’ll definitely get stable.
I think I will opt for one of the atomic distros like Bazzite or Aurora, since yes, it seems very interesting and a nice project, but learning Nix just to get eventually a working system running again won’t be the right thing for me. But I will definitely load it into a VM and try it out when I have more time at hands!
Take a look at blue-build.org. You create a recipe (not very difficult), that can be set to use a Fedora atomic distro like Aurora, Bazzite or Kinoite as a base, then add your own apps to the image it creates so they’re all installed along with the OS. It’s really solid and also supports rollbacks.
Oh, this sounds good! Thanks a lot!
Since OP mentioned that they used Plasma in the past and don’t like GNOME, it might be worth mentioning that KDE is developing their own OS which should be immutable.
Might have to wait for a little bit though.
I noticed that you are interested in immutable distros! That’s a good choice for your requirements, since it allows you to skip troubleshooting most issues by rebooting or performing a rollback.
I myself am happily using NixOS, but I think its advantages only shine when you want to spend time configuring your system. That being said, if you want to invest that time once and you stay on the stable version, you can also have quite a stable experience.
The other two options you listed are both atomic Fedora spins made by uBlue, which add minor customizations to the base image. Both of their non-GNOME seem to be based on Fedora Kinoite, which would be another option. Fedora is generally more opinionated, which is good if you don’t want to tweak anything.
Between these Fedora images, I’d recommend Fedora Kinoite for simple setups and Bazzite if your focus is on gaming. I have never heard of Aurora before and it doesn’t seem to add that much. That being said, if you want to try out multiple of these options, you can always rebase your current atomic Fedora desktop to another image!
Thank you guys so much for all your recommendations and thoughts! After some further analysis I decided to install Bazzite for the following reasons:
- shares a lot of similarities with other Atomic distros
- but has all the nice gaming related things pre-installed and configured and it uses a properly pre-installed Steam (not the Flatpak version) (the main reason why I chose it over Aurora, which would have been my next best pick)
- my qemu virtual machines run perfectly fine (also the shared folder)
- some dev stuff already pre-installed (don’t think I need more than there already is)
- fast and the OS feels like made out of one block, very consistent
- I was ready to use my machine like I want to in basically no time
- I already love the atomic way of handling updates
- so far no issues
The only thing left for me to do is to figure out how to properly install SyncThing and Zerotier-One, then I am absolutely set.
I’m pretty sure I used SyncThing from Flatpak at one point and it run great
CachyOS - still in the arch environment but it somehow remains consistently stable
I second Cachy, been running this for almost a year now and nothing major has broken.
Thank you, haven’t heard of it yet, and will look into it!
It is 90% arch, except for the few packages it has in it’s own repository. I have it on two pc’s and I have used arch for years I can not say it’s any different from a stability perspective. I almost never have issues on arch but also I wouldn’t recommend cachyos to anyone who had issues with arch. Couse I definitely had to remove custom packages just to fix dependency issues etc.
I realize you’ve already made your switch, but I wanted to toss in my 2 cents. I had a very similar, though shorter term experience with Arch, and I still love it dearly, but over time some jank began to creep in around the edges. The time came to make some sort of change when I finally decided to wipe the windows boot drive I had in the system. I took the opportunity to upgrade the m.2 ssd and decided on NixOS for a handful of reasons, and it’s honestly been super refreshing. I feel even more in control of the stability of my system than any OS I’ve used before. If something is going wrong, it is most likely something I did in my config, or the config isn’t even valid and the system tells me exactly what is wrong before I even get to a point where I’m trying to boot into a broken system. I ignored a lot of the online recommendations to use flakes and home manager and whatever. Just a single text file with all the details of my system in it. I find it incredibly digestible compared to tracking down issues with Arch.
Anyway, I also have a Bazzite system, and like it. Sounds like you’ve found a nice new home!
Thank you for your input! NixOS sounds very intriguing to me but it also appears to be an absolute beast. I’d need time to dive into the Nix world, but I definitely will do so!
Yes, so far I am happy with it.
For me, the endgame is Fedora. Your mileage may vary, however.
I went with bazzite after using hyprland and arch for a while, for gaming and photo editing its been great. Comes loaded with so much stuff which was actually kind of nice. The only thing I didn’t like is the focus on flatpaks but they are fine for most things. I just had to install darktable natively with rpm ostree because the flatpak kept crashing out if I scrolled past too many photos.
Other then that it’s been solid on my laptop and gaming rig
Your problem isn’t Arch. It’s the fact that the Weyland experience is still under development and so not stable release to release.
This will be true on any distro.
If your solution is to freeze your distro in a certain point in time, don’t type
pacmananymore.Noooo that’s a terrible idea 😭
If six months from now you decide that you do need updates, Arch won’t like the accumulated six months of updates coming all at once and might throw a tantrum.
Also not updating is a bad idea in general, you do need security updates for stuff like your browser. Please don’t use an out of date system. If you want, install something like debian which will give you only critical updates that won’t break stuff until the next release.
Upgrading an Arch install months or even years out of date is not that big of a deal. That’s one of the benefits of a rolling release platform.
Once after a move, an old desktop sat in a box for at least two years and I had it updated in a hour or so. Yes, you have to review the archlinux.org news feed for breaking changes, but if you follow any steps that pertain to your packages it’ll work fine.
The Linux Unplugged podcast did something similar to an old Arch based server. Only one year out of date, but they had a similar experience.
Really? That’s nice to know, I’ve always heard that it would cause problems if you didn’t update for a long time.
Well, updating can cause problems whenever you do it.
Technically, you should check the news feed for breaking changes whenever you update your system. Usually, the worst that happens is pacman just barfs. Then you can figure out why and apply any fixes.
But it still works!
Written on an hp compact from 1997 Running msdos
I wish :)
Well as long as you’re not connecting to the internet you should be fine 😅
Wait… can you actually connect to the internet with MS-DOS?..
The problem is with Arch. Not that it is by design bad, it is just that with software under heavy development will add new issues more easily, especially if you roll out updates very fast, which happens with a rolling distro. And like the other user already said: not updating your system is a bad idea.
Maybe try void linux? More diy and little bit harder cause of runit so u will learn how booting process works maybe, void is really stable but still rolling release
Void sounds interesting to tinker around with it but I don’t want to tinker anymore. It is fine for me to have a reasonable learning curve in the beginning, but I just want something that works once set up and that goes out of my way.
Additionally, Void is still a rolling release distro so the same downside to it applies to Arch and vice versa. Arch is not unstable per se, it just depends on the packages you are using.
I was thinking about blendOS at some point - it seemed like a decent proposition the best way to stick with arch, but have the declarative and atomic bits, without going to a new nix thing that sound like a more extreme nerd cult.
But I never did, I’m still mainly on Arch+XFCE or arch+kde, or debian+kde, or debian+xfce in my house.
I think I didn’t do it because I’ve never really heard of BlendOS , no established track record. No one ever recommends it. So it might not still be there in 5 years, so I’d have to be sure it’d all still work if the project ended. Meh, too much bother to figure that out.
If this promised deluge of PCs comes along soon i’ll maybe try it on a spare machine.
I think most people will say go fedora due to track record - but i never liked it when i last used it - a long time ago.
I also never stuck with Fedora but to be fair, this was several years ago. With the atomic versions, it really seems like a different discussion now.
I am also always skeptical at first with low track record distros, but will still have a look!
