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At the moment I‘m using Arch. The installation is about 4 years old and I‘m totally pleased in terms of stability and performance. I had only issues with updates introducing wayland defaults interfering with my nvidia gfx card.
Honestly I‘m addicted to versions and really need to have the latest version of most things. E.g. gfx drivers, kernel, browsers, gnome and numerous utilities. For security reasons I try to minimize 3rd pary repos or things like AUR or PPA. Currently I have just 3 AUR packages installed.
In the beginning I tried to have this with ubuntu ending up in trusting dozends of alternative repos and PPAs. But in my opinion this puts you into a high risk because you cannot really trust all those repos that run software wth root privelagues. So i switched to rolling release/Arch which seems the best option for me. Do you think this is true?
What do you think about Antergos? It seems to be ARCH with an installer? Are there any disadvantages compared do a desktop linux setup done like ARCH traditional?
I plan to try out Open Suse thumbleweed. I already tried to Fedora but wasn‘t that pleased.
At work I deal a lot with SLES, RHEL, core os, tiny box and Ubuntu. I never really made experiences with Debian, but most of my raspies are running raspian because I care only about stability (and security). I never touched any other distros like Slackware so far.
Are there other distros that I should have a look at or you would recommend under the given boundarys?
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If you are fine with Arch, stick with Arch. You can also try upcoming Ubuntu 18.10 (Lubuntu finally switches from LXDE to LXQt there) which is going to have the newest possible software without a need to use many PPAs. The downside is that you'll have to upgrade it every six month, and this could be annoying if you are accustomed to a rolling-release distro.
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Pros:
- It's still Arch Linux, but is oriented toward the casual user
- Rolling release
- All the software you already know from Arch Linux (pacman, etc...), plus AUR
- Graphical installer and settings manager
- Graphical package manager
- Packages are more tested
- Supports latest NVIDIA drivers out of the box
- Great community
Cons:
- It's a rolling release, but "less rolling": you have to wait longer for upgrades (usually a week or two)
- Sometimes packages from AUR can't be installed because the system has old packages or conflicting one (it's not so common, but it happens)
So, basically, if you like Arch then Arch is what you want. Not really any other distro out there quite like it.
Honestly I dislike the concept of Manjaro and am not convinced it helps avoiding issues. In a best case they are able to automate things like manually deleting packages/folders which is sometimes necessary for Arch. Also I'm fine with the console.
Regarding Antergos which seems to be widely used:
Is it bloated or do I really start with a naked linux?
Does it make some choices I have to revert or can't influence, e.g. using networkmanager? Partitioning? Bootloader? ...?
Bootloader I only trust Grub. I tried other bootloaders but they where not as easy and reliable.
Don't get me wrong I used to love arch and also antergos when I didn't have the nerves to set up the complete system from scratch.
With antergos you will basically, have the same choices as with arch. Partitioning ca happen automatically or manually with chnci installer and regarding bootloader there is grub and I believe one alternative.
But the simplification of the install process also takes away some degree of control over what gets installed and what settings are configured, but most things can be changed afterwards.
But, if you really want to have complete control over your setup and don't mind compiling your packages from source, you could also give gentoo a try. I have been a former arch user and I must say I really love gentoo now. But everyone has his very own taste ?
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Ubuntu really isn't too bad distro even if you want to do something weird. You can still have the root partition on btrfs on bcache backed by both ssd and harddrive if you know what you are doing. I doubt the installer support it though, so debootstrap is the way to do it. My laptop also use ubuntu and it has root partition on lvm on cryptsetup. The installer has or had some support for that, but it doesn't always work, so again, debootstrap can save the day.
I don't feel ubuntu restricts me any more than arch linux did, but I still use the arch wiki occasionally. I think ubuntu PPAs are much nicer than arch linux's AUR, and I wasn't able to use arch without using AUR.
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Would reccomend manjaro over Antergos anyday. Debian still feels like it is in the stone age, again you will be scratching for distro created packages. Ubuntu is still pretty meh.
This is all from a AMD gpu users view point though for video drivers ive had the best compatability with minimal messing around with arch. From an app point of view, for the rolling distros I found arch to have the most in house built packages. You will find opensuse has a lot of community built repos just it has a ninfty web interface for it's version of AUR pretty much.
Ubuntu would probably be your goto if you don't use any odd ball apps and run a nvidia card. Well I would probably still reccomend arch. But I'm used to arch, most people don't like it becuase it's "complicated".
But as you have said yourve been using arch for 4+ years I would say stick with it, it is a solid platform and the AUR is probably one of the safest run user created repositories because you can look at how and what is being built in the PKGBUILD files.