What do you consider to be the “Goldilocks” distro? the one that balances ease of install and use, up-to-date, stability, speed, etc… You get the idea.

I’m not a newb, these last few years I’ve lived in the Debian and derivatives side of things, but I’ve used RH, Slackware, Puppy :), and older stuff, like mandrake/mandriva and others. Never tried Suse or Arch, and while Nix looks appealing, I need something to put in production rapidly. I have tried Kinoite in a VM, but I couldn’t install something (which I can’t remember), and that turned me off.

Oh I’m on Mint right now, because lazy, but it’s acting up with a couple of VMs, which I need, I really don’t have the time or desire to maybe spend two days troubleshooting, and I’m a bit fed up with out of date pkgs.

  • lemmyvoreEnglish
    54·
    6 days ago

    If you’re lazy (which I take to mean you like low maintenance) and haven’t tried a rolling release distro, you need to try Manjaro. It’s downstream of Arch (like Mint vs Debian) but with a lot of QoL improvements that take the edge off.

    It’s"Goldilocks" for me because it’s rolling and has recent packages but also very low maintenance. I was sick of 3rd-party repo incompatibilies and update issues on Ubuntu.

    It’s a curated take on Arch in that it sources packages from Arch but holds them back until they’re in a decent shape. Recent example was the Plasma 6 which they’ve held back a couple of months until most bugs had been cleared, but normally they release packages on a 2 week cycle.

    It works out of the box, keeps working indefinitely (5 years going for me), and they have integrated system snapshots if you use BTRFS for root, just in case (automatically takes snapshots before every update, which you can restore from Grub). Never had to use a snapshot (did it only once to see if it works).

    Limitations of Manjaro compared to Arch:

    • Not as bleeding edge due to holding packages for a while.
    • You have to stick to their way of doing stuff, like their tools for graphics drivers and kernel management.
    • You have to stick to a LTS kernel or at least keep one installed as backup at all times.
    • It won’t change your kernel major version for you, ever. Some people see this as a disadvantage, personally I greatly prefer it.
    • You have to stick to their stable package repo. If you use their unstable/testing repos all bets are off (which is not going to be news to someone familiar with Debian).
    • You get access to the AUR but the usual warnings apply since AUR is even wilder than Sid. Some people say they’ve ran into trouble installing some AUR packages on Manjaro due to missing dependencies. It’s never happened to me but I can see how it could happen due to the package delay.
    • You can’t say “I use Arch btw”. Arch fans tend to hate Manjaro because they see its limitations and hand-holding as antithetical to Arch’s goals.

    Regarding that last point, there’s a very vocal minority that will smear Manjaro any chance they get All I can say is, try it for yourself.

    • Quazatron@lemmy.world
      2·
      6 days ago

      I can confirm it works as advertised, has very low maintenance and good performance.

      I use it for gaming with Steam, Heroic, Lutris and a bunch of emulators, web browsing, some light development and home lab.

    • steeznson@lemmy.world
      2·
      6 days ago

      The Manjaro team have had well publicised mistakes in the past which I think the community were right to highlight. However to be fair to them it was like a decade ago they had the PGP one, and they seem to have become a more professional outfit since then.

      • lemmyvoreEnglish
        2·
        6 days ago

        All distributions make mistakes. It’s a complex job. Debian stable had a local root elevation exploit on for a while a couple of months ago and nobody batted an eye. People would have a field day if that happened to Manjaro.

        It’s a double standard borne out of the resentment of a vocal minority and that sucks. The Linux community wastes so much energy on these pointless feuds. (And then they wonder why there’s never the year of the Linux desktop…) Linux and FOSS are not about treating user share as a zero sum game but unfortunately there are people who can only think in terms of “if you use another distro you’re dumb and I must ridicule you”.

        It’s an especially narrow-minded take with distros like Manjaro, which is different enough from Arch that its users were never going to use Arch anyway.