I made a post a few days ago asking your opinion on Manjaro and it was very mixed, with a slightly negative overall opinion. I heard some recommend EndeavourOS instead and did some online research and it seems to be pretty solid and not have the repository problem that Manjaro has.
Just for context I am a Linux noob and have only used Mint for about the past six months. While I don’t have any major complaints, I am looking to explore more distros and the Arch repository with its rolling releases. I am not a huge fan of how certain packages on apt are a few years old and outdated. However, I also don’t have the time to be always configuring my OS and just want something that works well out of the box.
Is EndeavourOS a solid choice?
That was the first distro switching from Mac. Obviously. Used for 5 days only. Everything is too simple to make it convinient and easy to use. Top taskbar is absolutly useless, yet takes some vert space. Replacing most default apps or try Mint? Mint was ok (BTW).
Top taskbar? Are you sure you didn’t use the vanilla XFCE setup or GNOME? Mint sucks and has a bad track record.
I don’t really understand the need for it. I’d rather just use Arch.
It’s great! I’m using it as my daily driver on my desktop. Haven’t run into any issues so far. It comes with some handy tools like a one click updater. So general maintenance is very easy.
I haven’t used it, but it seems like a thin wrapper over Arch so it should work pretty well.
If you don’t want to tinker but want a rolling release, give OpenSUSE Tumbleweed a shot. It has a lot going for it that other rolling releases tend to either not do or leave to the user, such as:
- BTRFS snapshots configured automatically - if an upgrade goes bad (pretty rare), you can do a snapper rollback and try the upgrade later
- OpenQA - the devs write automated tests when there’s a problem, so breakages rarely repeat
- YaST - system settings management, so you don’t need to learn all of the CLI tools for things like firewalls or user admin
And packages are usually about as new as Arch, sometimes newer. I used Arch for ~5 years and Tumbleweed almost as long, and Tumbleweed seems to work better for me (less manual intervention, less breakage, etc). If you want a custom package, it doesn’t support the AUR, but it has a user repository that has pretty much everything I wanted from the AUR anyway.
Arch is great if you want to tinker and make a super customized setup, but if you just want newer packages, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or Fedora is probably a better option.
