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!

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[–] 3 points 8 months ago (6 children)

can someone who runs arch btw on weak hardware, like dual-core U-series i5 and such, tell me how they're handling AUR and friends? every time I bring that up I get downvotes as if I'm some MICROS~1 agent paid to besmirch arch btw's good name and whatnot...

the idea that I hafta build and compile shit on a puny dual-core in 2026 is fucking ludicrous to me, never mind the bloat and cruft from all the build tools and deps for every possible stack. so what obvious solution am I missing? like, how do you handle a full system upgrade, say you got like ten things from AUR in addition to regular packages, what does that look like?

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    One suggestion is to look for -bin versions of the packages you want. Those are precompiled and should install only marginally slower than a regular pacman package.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    Back in 2015, I was using Arch on a single core Intel Atom 1.5GHz processor with 1GiB of RAM

    Most packages came from binary packages, and the AUR was the exception when I needed something specific outside of the main repos

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