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.
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.
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 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.
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.
CachyOS - still in the arch environment but it somehow remains consistently stable
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.
Thank you, haven’t heard of it yet, and will look into it!
