so a common claim I see made is that arch is up to date than Debian but harder to maintain and easier to break. Is there a good sort of middle ground distro between the reliability of Debian and the up-to-date packages of arch?
Manjaro has been specifically designed to have fresh packages (sourced from Arch) but to be user friendly, long term stable, and provide as many features as possible out of the box.
It requires some compromises in order to achieve this, in particular it wants you to stick to its curated package repo and a LTS kernel and use it’s helper apps (package/kernel/driver manager) and update periodically. It won’t remain stable if you tinker with it.
You’ll get packages slower than Arch (depending on complexity, Plasma 6 took about two months, typically it’s about two weeks) but faster than Debian stable.
I’m running it as my main driver for gaming and work for about 5 years now and it’s been exactly what I wanted, a balanced mix of rolling and stable distro.
I’ve also given it to family members who are not computer savvy and it’s been basically zero maintenance on my part.
If it has one downside is that you really have to leave it alone to do its thing. In that regard it takes a special category of user to enjoy it — you have to either be an experienced user who knows to leave it alone or a very basic user who doesn’t know how to mess with it. The kind of enthusiastic Linux user who wants to tinker will make it fall apart and hate it, and they’d be happier on Arch or some of the other distros mentioned here.
or you could use a distro made by competent people and that actually serves the purpose Manjaro claims to have.
You really shouldn’t go for Arch & derivatives if you don’t want to fiddle with your system (the whole point of Arch & co) and really want stability (not that arch is that unstable tbh as long as you manage it proprely). Manjaro included. In fact especially manjaro since it manages to be less stable than Arch specifically because of their update policy. I mean why even be on Arch if you can’t use the AUR and have the latest packages?
Aside from this and maybe a few others there isn’t really a wrong distro to choose, better alternatives would be NixOS (stable), Fedora, Debian testing and probably several other distros that you probably should avoid for being one-man projects or stuff.
There is no other Arch-based distro that strives to achieve a “rolling-stable” release.
Alternatives like Fedora have already been mentioned by other comments.
Debian testing is not a rolling release. Its package update strategy is focused on becoming the next stable so the frequency ebbs and flows around stable’s release cycle.
manjaro since it manages to be less stable than Arch specifically because of their update policy
This is false. Their delayed updates mitigate issues in latest packages. Plasma 6 was released late but it was a lot more usable, for example.
I mean why even be on Arch if you can’t use the AUR and have the latest packages?
Anybody who wants Arch should use Arch. Manjaro is not Arch.
Some of us don’t want the latest packages the instant they release, we’re fine with having them a week or a month late if it means extra stability.
There’s nothing magical about what Manjaro is doing, it stands to reason that if you delay packages even a little some bugs will be fixed.
Also you can use AUR on Manjaro perfectly fine, I myself have over 100 AUR packages installed. But AUR is not supported even by Arch so it’s impossible to offer any guarantees for it.
There’s also Flatpak and some people may prefer that since it’s more reliable.
that’s because you can’t have both. It’ arch or it’s very stable. Granted Arch by itself is not that unstable if you manage it well and know what you’re doing but we’re talking hardly ever having to troubleshoot something.
Manjaro doesn’t acieve any more stability than Arch, and in fact is actually worse than arch.
Debian testing is a rolling.
Manjaro is an arch derivative and has the bad parts of arch still. Again, why recommend manjaro when you have better alternatives that actually achieve what manjaro sets itself out to be? Fedora had KDE plasma 6 sooner than Manjaro afaik and it managed to be stable, it is a semi-rolling with up to date yet stable packages etc, same for OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Manjaro has no purpose, it’s half-assed at being arch and it’s half-assed at being stable.
AUR isn’t a problem in Manjaro because of lack of support, it’s a problem because packages there are made with Arch and 99.999% of its derivatives in mind, aka latest packages not one week old still-broken packages. Also Manjaro literally accidentally DDoSes the AUR every now and then because again they’re incompetent.
And if you’re going to be using Flatpaks then all the more reason to not bother using Manjaro or any arch derivative and just use an actually stable distro with flatpaks.
