Should I stay or should I go

[Arokan]

With November coming closer, and my old rig getting older, I've decided that I want to build a new PC after 10 years as I recently hit the point, where I wanted to play the game and didn't meet the minimum required mark.

 

I've been using Debian as daily driver for the past year and I'm really content with it. Using it has boosted my user experience by a lot and I would now consider myself an advanced user; I write my own scripts, usually know where to look when an error occurs and so on.

 

Now with that new machine, being on an up-to-date hardware, I was wondering whether it'd be a good idea to switch to arch. Besides being able to wear a cool t-shirt, I thought that rolling release might be an advantage in gaming. On the other hand, I've also read that arch usually crashes every 2 months, which might be true or not. I don't have the experience so far. I don't mind spending a day installing it, but how much time does it take in maintenance?

Let me know what you guys think about this!

[Eigenvektor]

If you want "arch like" you could go with Manjaro instead. It comes with an installer, is also a rolling release, but lags a small bit behind Arch to allow for some added stability before new stuff hits users.

 

Unless installing operating systems is your hobby or you want to help by reporting bugs on bleeding edge software, Arch is rarely the way to go.

 

If you want to get a feel for it "risk free" try it out in a VM for some time.

[Sauron]

1 hour ago, Arokan said:

I thought that rolling release might be an advantage in gaming.

Any advantage would be marginal at best and not really related to being rolling release - it's mostly luck of the draw on certain packages interacting better with certain games.

1 hour ago, Arokan said:

I've also read that arch usually crashes every 2 months

That's not true but you should update it regularly. Breakages happen if you let it sit unupdated for months and then run a full update without reading critical messages on the main website. It goes without saying that going with a rolling release and never updating doesn't make much sense. Software on the main repositories is always stable, it might just cause some incompatibilities with third party software that isn't updated as often.

[10leej]

Arch doesn't really crash every 2 months and generally can be every bit as stable as Debian. Honestly though you can get Drbian stable working with modern hardware expect for maybe the latest and great network chips and wifi cards. Your amd 6000 series gpu and nvidia 3k series has driver support. 

And even the Intel Arc GPU will work "kinda" with a 5.10 kernel. 

That said, every distro can break. The difference is that with Arch your expected to know how to fix it.

[Kiba Snowpaw]

Always go arch ^_^ I use Garuda and its arch and i love it. Also Garuda is setup for gaming out the box.

 

[Ralphred]

18 hours ago, Arokan said:

I've been using Debian as daily driver for the past year and I'm really content with it.

Debian has certain qualities to it that I gravitate towards too; I find "derivative" distro's constraining in one way or another, to the point they are never worth it and thus end up defaulting to the `root` distro they are derived from.

As any RPM based distro's root would technically be Redhat (or fedora) that's out of the question, if you fancy arch then use arch, but not some 'easy to use version'. I'm not saying debian is hard to use, it just requires more hands on knowledge than most of the derived offerings, and as such "man [problem software]" is already in your toolkit.

Quote

as daily driver

I'm not convinced arch offers the toolkit to mix and match "bleeding edge" and "stable" as well as gentoo does, if for example you needed specific newer version of things like mesa/vulkan to keep eeking out the best from your new system, but this is kind of moot, as in 6 months it'll be in the debian testing branch (which is more stable than most distro's stable branch, lets be honest about this), so what it boils down to is what you buy, and seeing as debian is binary anyway, if you buy a new hard drive you can mess around with whatever you like on it, and just swap you current drive into the new machine for daily driving, allowing you to run something as stable as a 4 year old on crack for the other stuff without any real consequences.

[The Hope]

If you are experienced in Linux and choose as few AUR packages as possible and choose a stable desktop environment, you will usually be able to run Arch for more than 5 years without significant problems. That's how it always was for me.

 

However, I'm a bigger fan of Void Linux because it should be a bit more technically stable and because it doesn't use systemd, which makes it more responsive and boots faster.

[.Antho]

On 10/14/2022 at 1:42 AM, Arokan said:

With November coming closer, and my old rig getting older, I've decided that I want to build a new PC after 10 years as I recently hit the point, where I wanted to play the game and didn't meet the minimum required mark.

 

I've been using Debian as daily driver for the past year and I'm really content with it. Using it has boosted my user experience by a lot and I would now consider myself an advanced user; I write my own scripts, usually know where to look when an error occurs and so on.

 

Now with that new machine, being on an up-to-date hardware, I was wondering whether it'd be a good idea to switch to arch. Besides being able to wear a cool t-shirt, I thought that rolling release might be an advantage in gaming. On the other hand, I've also read that arch usually crashes every 2 months, which might be true or not. I don't have the experience so far. I don't mind spending a day installing it, but how much time does it take in maintenance?

Let me know what you guys think about this!

Honestly, if gaming is your thing, I'd recommend Nobara. It's created by Glorious Egroll, is based on Fedora and has many niceties that just make it quick to get up and running, and plenty of optimizations out of the box. Honestly, I would recommend something Fedora based for the fact that it's what I'd call "Cutting edge" sitting neatly between stable and bleeding edge, you get newer packages but they've been vetted to not blow up over an update. 

[wasab]

My experience with arch

 

Expectation: I can customize everything, it will be cool

 

Reality, I ended up installing tons of packages that are out of the box by default on other distro and wasted countless hours to make it look like the other distros simply because out of the box looks very bland and I lack the artistic touch to make it anywhere as close to visual appealing as other customized desktop environment. I ended just grabbing theme packs I had used before.

 

So yeah, big waste of my time. Now I would only get a fully featured distro with all the softwares and quality of life features without needing to track down each one of these package and write countless config files and whatnots. This means either Ubuntu or fedora. Manjaro is also an option if I get bored. 

 

 

 

 

[LloydLynx]

My experience with Arch was stable to start with, but the system got cluttered and eventually most of the GUI programs just refused to launch at all with no error, just a blank terminal. Also, you'll need to refresh arch-keyring every now and then when pacman stops working. It's a distro that expects its end users to be nearly developer level smart. I think that's a bit unreasonable in my opinion. 

 

Void would be a better option, though it's less mainstream so community support is less. It's rolling release, but packages get updated when they're actually ready, not when the program developer says they're ready. This makes for a more stable and lower maintenance distro. You install non-free and 32-bit repos like you're installing packages. It's quite odd compared to everything else, but works well. 

[Takumidesh]

EndeavourOS scratches the arch itch for me while not being a pita to work with. also it uses the arch repos unlike manjaro.

[AlphaObeisance]

On 10/14/2022 at 12:42 AM, Arokan said:

With November coming closer, and my old rig getting older, I've decided that I want to build a new PC after 10 years as I recently hit the point, where I wanted to play the game and didn't meet the minimum required mark.

 

I've been using Debian as daily driver for the past year and I'm really content with it. Using it has boosted my user experience by a lot and I would now consider myself an advanced user; I write my own scripts, usually know where to look when an error occurs and so on.

 

Now with that new machine, being on an up-to-date hardware, I was wondering whether it'd be a good idea to switch to arch. Besides being able to wear a cool t-shirt, I thought that rolling release might be an advantage in gaming. On the other hand, I've also read that arch usually crashes every 2 months, which might be true or not. I don't have the experience so far. I don't mind spending a day installing it, but how much time does it take in maintenance?

Let me know what you guys think about this!

I +1 the idea of moving to Arch. I took a very similar route on my Linux Journey as you have; and ultimately what Debian did for us, Arch took that even farther. 

When I came to Linux and got a grasp of really the only 3 distro's that matter, Arch/RHEL/Debian, as everything else is really just a fork; I decided I was going to learn Debian, once I did that I was confident in using Linux, so took on Arch to DIY my own system, and now I'm studying to get RHCSA Cert for RHEL. 

Personally I've enjoyed Arch above all others; but it really just boils down to preference. I'd encourage you to look into the Arch Wiki if you haven't already. The documentation is so thorough it's literally become impossible for me not to reference it, even when not using an Arch distro (VM's). https://wiki.archlinux.org/

Congrats on your endeavor for a new build! That's always a fun time in life!