I’ve been using Debian (and formerly Ubuntu) for many years.
But I’ve been wanting to tell people that I use Arch.
I’ve been considering the following distros:
- Arch
- Cachy
- Manjaro
- Any others?
I’m leaning towards Arch or Cachy. This is for a mediocre laptop that I’m planning to use as a media center: Kodi, Retroarch, Steam, etc. Should I even be using Arch for this? Maybe Debian is more stable…
Sorry if this has been asked before. Thanks for any tips!
Cachyos has a meta gaming package which will install steam, Lutris and a couple of launchers like heroic games launcher. Should have some extra optimisations as well. Lutris can install emulators too, as well as showing games in your steam library. I’m not sure if it can go full screen like retroarch and use a controller to select games, maybe it can.
I used to use manjaro for four-ish years. Good times.
I now run Guix btw.
I’ve always gravitated toward various Arch-based distros. Installed vanilla from scratch a decade ago for a college workstation, sunk a lot of time into tinkering the steam deck’s SteamOS, and my desktop’s been running CachyOS for just about a year now - the latter’s been so smooth that I opted to wipe my Deck and install their handheld edition just because, and that’s been pretty solid too.
I haven’t really distro-hopped enough to say much else, but Cachy’s been my go-to since I first set it up and it’d take a lot to move me off if it. All the Arch benefits with some extra bells and whistles.
EndeavourOS is the way to go, btw.
I was using Endeavour, btw. Needed almost zero tinkering and was good to go straight away.
But I run Linux on an ancient 2012 MacBook Pro, so eventually swapped over to Debian, btw.
Why did you change from Endeavour to Debian? Didn’t it work well on the MacBook you have? Just curious, no judging.
Endeavour worked totally fine, no issues whatsoever… or no issue where Debian does better at least.
My 2 main reasons were:
-
Ignorance over the point at which hardware components become so old and deprecated that bleeding edge updates might just break something one day. Couldn’t find a definitive answer, but I knew if Debian 13 works fine now it should still be working fine in 2 years. That Mac has outdated Intel/Nvidia graphics that have always been problematic on Linux, and many distros won’t even boot the live USB on it, so it felt like if any computer was ever going to spontaneously have a post-update issue it would probably be that one.
-
Trying the give my ageing hardware the easiest ride in its senior years. The SSD is still original and approaching 14 years of pretty heavy use, so I thought to have it surviving as long as possible an OS that might only give 0-300MB of updates in a week would be a safer bet than an OS that would have many many more gigabytes of updates over a longer period of time.
Thanks for the explanation. That reminds me an issue. I changed my default gamepad.
At least one issue with EndeavourOS I had in the past (and that’s not an issue with the distribution, but with the model of having newest Kernel) was that the newest Kernel sometimes broke the driver for my gamepad, XBox One S proprietary dongle using medusalix xone driver from AUR to be specific. So I had to wait sometimes days or longer until the driver was updated in order to use the controller. This issue could be avoided when using an LTS Kernel instead, which is very easy to setup in EndeavourOS as it comes with such a GUI.
Your given arguments makes lot of sense. So it is about stability (in the sense of not changing, not about bugs). So you seek a setup and forget installation, which is understandable and maybe would have preferred doing so too in your case.
Yes, at this stage. Although before now I’ve installed a few different things over the last couple of years as a learning experience also.
It’s not my main computer, but one I replaced. This freed me up to have a computer with no music or photos or anything on it, so I could test different distros and DEs and troubleshoot stuff without having any concerns about losing anything if I made a mistake or just erased and started over.
I’d never actually used Linux before 2023, much more familiar now.
-
I’m interested in what you’ve done withe the MBPro. I have the same thing and I’ve been wanting to do something with it since it still seems like a solid platform.
What made you switch to Debian?
Also what do you use the computer for?
For the reasons I switched to Debian see my other reply.
I use the computer for:
- Learning and understanding Linux, in the broader sense. It’s a “spare” computer and over the past 3 years I’ve installed Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Gnome, Pop! OS, Spiral Linux, G4OS, Linux Mint, LMDE, Spiral Linux, Debian, EndeavourOS, Fedora, Garuda… and I’ve failed to install (wouldn’t boot to live USB, or wouldn’t boot after installation) many more, including Void, PikaOS, MX Linux, OpenSUSE, and probably a few others…
- Playing old games. I’ve got a steam deck, but for things like Return To Castle Wolfenstein and the Settlers II you just need a mouse and keyboard. Lutris has been awesome.
If you have a 15” Retina MBP, it’s been a huge pain in the ass, and multiple distros just stopped working after updates, often not long after installation. But also it’s been a good learning experience for the very same same reason. To work well in 2026 it needs the Nvidia graphics disabling - but the NVRAM defaults that Mac to Nvidia at startup for Linux, so even that bit isn’t straightforward! If you simply blacklist Nvidia it won’t boot.
I also bought a USB WiFi adapter as the Broadcom card doesn’t work initially on most distros, and can’t support WPA3 even when it does work.
I prefer plain old arch
Just arch with gnome
For a mediacenter that isn’t on bleeding edge hardware, fedora or Debian would be my choice for stability. Performance will be similar regardless of distro.
I use arch on my desktop and laptop and Debian/Ubuntu on servers.
Arch, on well supported hardware. That means no Nvidia. No Ultra 5 series CPUs.
I use Artix btw. Pretty stable, I guess I have to fix something a few times a year.
+1 for Artix
But, if you’re not a masochist, EndeavourOS is a good second choice.
But I’ve been wanting to tell people that I use Arch.
Biblically accurate arch user
EndeavourOS is my first choice, CachyOS is my second choice.
If you don’t want to spend your time larping sysadmin I’d recommend one of the uBlue images as Kodi, Retroarch and Steam are available from Flathub. If you want to spend your time keeping your media center alive (and possibly learn something about Linux in the process), go ahead with Arch or any of its derivatives. I use Aurora, btw.
Arch in the front, Debian in the back(end). I run Arch on my laptop and Debian on my homeserver. I’ve ran Debian on laptops before and if stable is getting older hardware support can be a struggle, much better on a rolling distro like Arch. And having all the newest toys on your desktop is very very nice. While on my homeserver I mostly want stability, everything else runs in (podman) containers anyway.
Cachy is a distro I would consider, because it’ll theoretically give you slightly better battery life due to the optimised compiles, although I’m not sure you’ll ever really notice. Manjaro has a reputation of breaking far more often than Arch does, so that one’s a no for me.
I used to experiment around with various distros some years past until I got into Arch. Haven’t distro hopped once since, I’ve completely erased Windows from my life and I’m gaming exactly as I would if I was on Windows. I never have trouble finding a package since almost everything exists either in the official repositories or in the AUR, and I get the latest versions with all the new features and fixes. Rarely some things do break because of the rolling releases, but it’s almost always just a matter of a single google search to fix. For me it’s worth it for having all the latest versions of everything.
My opinion would be different for a server or a work laptop where stability is much more important. For servers I would pick Debian for sure, for work laptop I’d consider Fedora probably
