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?
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