Started learning Linux with Manjaro a few years ago, but there were always stability issues pushing me away from daily driving. I found when I did have time to use my PC, it was largely for gaming, and when any issue presented and needed to be fixed it was a bit of a barrier to entry.
Because of biases I always leaned to Arch for that ‘bleeding edge’ and rolling updates, so when I gave Linux another shot long term a few months ago I went with EndeavourOS. Everything was rock solid but I found a lot of nitpicks and after a week or so my monitors wouldn’t wake from sleep… I of course don’t blame the OS as more than likely there was a log somewhere explaining my issue, but I really just want to enjoy playing games after a long day.
So I gave up on my faux dream of living on the edge and instead installed Pop_OS!, and to my pleasant surprise it has been rock solid and performant to boot! My preconceived biases against Debian and it’s derivatives drove me to borderline tribalism. Flatpak has remedied worries of outdated packages, and even if I did have an issue (bluetooth headphones defaulting to HSP not AD2P) I found the solution on the archwiki!
The beauty of this ecosystem is that Linux is Linux, we all benefit from improvements so long as they are made open and free, and no matter what flavor you choose, you’ll always be part of the family.
Thanks for reading, and thank you to the contributors who work tirelessly to make an open and free desktop a reality :)
Welcome to the club, we’re glad to have you.
I wish manjaro wasn’t so highly recommended to new users. It kept me from fully migrating due to stability issues that I thought were representative of Linux as a whole, but just aren’t.
I agree. Manjaro gives people a poor impression of Linux in general and Arch in particular.
Manjaro was the first distro for me where everything worked out of the box and everything was stable. I used it for 2 years and now I’m on nobara.
I tried mint but wifi didn’t work, I tried Endeavor but wifi didn’t work and it ran and looked like shit. Tried Ubuntu but I didn’t like the name. Tried arch but I couldn’t set it up.
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You know, I started with Pop! when I changed my gaming rig over a couple years ago. I always said I’d change over to something else, like Arch, which I use on other systems.
But Pop! has been surprisingly good. It’s a nice mix of stability and ability to swap out parts without issue. For example, I use the Liquorix kernel (similar goal to Arch’s Zen kernel) instead of the default Pop! kernel without any issue at all.
So I’ve just never changed it. I update of course but it’s the same original install it’s always been. Great experience.
Your rationale for going Pop was my exact one. I knew I wanted the bleeding edge, but this was a device I was going to (mostly) daily drive. I wanted it to be reliable. And Pop fixed that for me and didn’t force my hand with shoving Snaps down my throat.
Glad to have another join the ranks!
one of us! one of us!
Good work picking PopOS, it’s the one I recommend to everyone too.
I’ve been experimenting with Raspbian and RPi compatible distros. Now I needed a PC for some self hosting stuff. I tried Debian and arch with not much success. Tonight I installed Mint then PhotoPrism without a terminal error that I need to google for solution! Even the video card is detected. Everything worked and now it’s chugging away doing all the work instead of me troubleshooting.
I’ve been on PopOS for about 2 years now. I did have to dual boot windows about 6 months ago because the Sunshine streaming server refused to work consistently on linux, and I lacked the experience to properly diagnose why the issue was happening.
Compared to almost all other distros, Arch is advanced in the way that it’s the simplest of them all. Nothing except the very basics are set up for you, so it’s tough to start with.
PopOS is the one that finally made me a Linux fulltimer too, after 15ish years. Welcome!
Welcome 🙂. I always loved bleeding edge so Arch really suits me well. There’s probably a distro out there for everyone and you seemingly have found yours!
Raise the sails, we are going to high seas!
Sorry for the bad experience Manjaro gave you with rolling release, and Flatpak sucks.
Still better than snaps.
*having 10 instances of qt sucks
In my own use of Manjaro, I’ve found timeshift to be invaluable. If something breaks at a time when I can’t deal with fixing it, I timeshift to a known good install, and get back to fixing whatever broke in the up-to-date snapshot later.
