I’ve been using Debian (and formerly Ubuntu) for many years.
But I’ve been wanting to tell people that I use Arch.
I’ve been considering the following distros:
- Arch
- Cachy
- Manjaro
- Any others?
I’m leaning towards Arch or Cachy. This is for a mediocre laptop that I’m planning to use as a media center: Kodi, Retroarch, Steam, etc. Should I even be using Arch for this? Maybe Debian is more stable…
Sorry if this has been asked before. Thanks for any tips!
EndeavourOS is my first choice, CachyOS is my second choice.
I tried it, liked it, bricked my system, and now I enjoy EndeavourOS because it’s simple and easy.
Cachy
Stay away from Manjaro.
I’ve heard great things about Endeavor and Cachy, but personally use Garuda. Highly recommend it.
Tried Manjaro for a few months before it broke. EndeavourOS has been treating me well for about a year now.
EndeavourOS. It’s like Arch, but a bit easier with a few automation and gui stuff builtin. It’s still heavy on terminal usage and it comes light out of the box. I switched from Manjaro to EndeavourOS, because Manjaro gave me some problems (especially their package manager and because of the AUR too, and I didn’t like the maintainers, no further comment). It’s my daily driver for years now. I use it for everything, daily usage, little programming, gaming on Steam and especially RetroArch too. I’m a huge RetroArch fan. :-) So if you plan to use base Archlinux or Manjaro, then I can recommend to use EndeavourOS a lot.
Cachy OS is probably a good choice too, because their focus on performance optimizations. But they do also have a bit more, let’s say bloat, out of the box and their branding is a bit strong it seems. It’s a bit farther away from base Archlinux than EndeavourOS is.
Same, I use endeavorOS. Its just arch with a nice installer.
I was teaching a friend Linux, by ways of running through the manual Arch installation process and finally got to be on the other side of the ‘Ok, now that we’ve spent a ton of time doing this the hard way, here(endeavorOS) is how you use tools to do it in 3 seconds’.
i use cachyos, runs swimmingly for me. I’m not sure arch is good for your usecase tho.
Mediacenter/homeserver? I’d personally choose something like fedora, but debian sounds fine too
I used to be a diehard Fedora user and suggested it to everyone. Then they started allowing AI generated code, and I flipped. Moved to CachyOS on both my PC and Laptop, and they have been incredibly solid for about 3 months now.
But I’ve been wanting to tell people that I use Arch.
Biblically accurate arch user
I use plain Arch for desktop, but for servers I use headless debian. A media center is sort of in between, so up to you. In terms of resource usage on an older laptop, I expect the choice of DE would matter more.
I use Arch btw. The best Arch distro is just normal Arch linux. If you really want stuff from other “Arch distros”, you can add their repos or customize your configs. There’s nothing you can do in an Arch distro you can’t do with Arch itself.
Also, Manjaro bad. Cachy, EndeavourOS etc. are fine.
EndeavorOS is my go to for arch based systems. But with the archinstall script I’d say just give vanilla a go
Don’t use Manjaro it’s a wildly unstable piece of shit
Check out the Fedora Atomic distros Silverblue, Kinoite, etc. You can just run arch in a distrobox for your arch needs while keeping a clean and stable core.
EndeavourOS is the way to go, btw.
I was using Endeavour, btw. Needed almost zero tinkering and was good to go straight away.
But I run Linux on an ancient 2012 MacBook Pro, so eventually swapped over to Debian, btw.
I’m interested in what you’ve done withe the MBPro. I have the same thing and I’ve been wanting to do something with it since it still seems like a solid platform.
What made you switch to Debian?
Also what do you use the computer for?
For the reasons I switched to Debian see my other reply.
I use the computer for:
- Learning and understanding Linux, in the broader sense. It’s a “spare” computer and over the past 3 years I’ve installed Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Gnome, Pop! OS, Spiral Linux, G4OS, Linux Mint, LMDE, Spiral Linux, Debian, EndeavourOS, Fedora, Garuda… and I’ve failed to install (wouldn’t boot to live USB, or wouldn’t boot after installation) many more, including Void, PikaOS, MX Linux, OpenSUSE, and probably a few others…
- Playing old games. I’ve got a steam deck, but for things like Return To Castle Wolfenstein and the Settlers II you just need a mouse and keyboard. Lutris has been awesome.
If you have a 15” Retina MBP, it’s been a huge pain in the ass, and multiple distros just stopped working after updates, often not long after installation. But also it’s been a good learning experience for the very same same reason. To work well in 2026 it needs the Nvidia graphics disabling - but the NVRAM defaults that Mac to Nvidia at startup for Linux, so even that bit isn’t straightforward! If you simply blacklist Nvidia it won’t boot.
I also bought a USB WiFi adapter as the Broadcom card doesn’t work initially on most distros, and can’t support WPA3 even when it does work.
Why did you change from Endeavour to Debian? Didn’t it work well on the MacBook you have? Just curious, no judging.
Endeavour worked totally fine, no issues whatsoever… or no issue where Debian does better at least.
My 2 main reasons were:
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Ignorance over the point at which hardware components become so old and deprecated that bleeding edge updates might just break something one day. Couldn’t find a definitive answer, but I knew if Debian 13 works fine now it should still be working fine in 2 years. That Mac has outdated Intel/Nvidia graphics that have always been problematic on Linux, and many distros won’t even boot the live USB on it, so it felt like if any computer was ever going to spontaneously have a post-update issue it would probably be that one.
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Trying the give my ageing hardware the easiest ride in its senior years. The SSD is still original and approaching 14 years of pretty heavy use, so I thought to have it surviving as long as possible an OS that might only give 0-300MB of updates in a week would be a safer bet than an OS that would have many many more gigabytes of updates over a longer period of time.
Thanks for the explanation. That reminds me an issue. I changed my default gamepad.
At least one issue with EndeavourOS I had in the past (and that’s not an issue with the distribution, but with the model of having newest Kernel) was that the newest Kernel sometimes broke the driver for my gamepad, XBox One S proprietary dongle using medusalix xone driver from AUR to be specific. So I had to wait sometimes days or longer until the driver was updated in order to use the controller. This issue could be avoided when using an LTS Kernel instead, which is very easy to setup in EndeavourOS as it comes with such a GUI.
Your given arguments makes lot of sense. So it is about stability (in the sense of not changing, not about bugs). So you seek a setup and forget installation, which is understandable and maybe would have preferred doing so too in your case.
Yes, at this stage. Although before now I’ve installed a few different things over the last couple of years as a learning experience also.
It’s not my main computer, but one I replaced. This freed me up to have a computer with no music or photos or anything on it, so I could test different distros and DEs and troubleshoot stuff without having any concerns about losing anything if I made a mistake or just erased and started over.
I’d never actually used Linux before 2023, much more familiar now.
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i use arch but garuda and endevor are also good to look into
Garuda has been easy and stable for me. It’s gaming and performance focused though, so how well that works for you could depend on your laptop.
