Windows has been a thorn in my side for years. But ever since I started moved to Linux on my Laptop and swapping my professional software to a cross platform alternative, I've been dreaming on removing it from my SSD.
And as soon as I finish my last few projects, I can transition. (I want to do it now).
Trouble is which I danced my way across multiple amazing distros, I can't decide which one to land on since the one software I want to test, Davinci Resolve doesn't work on my Intel Powered Laptop. (curse you intel implementation of OpenCL).
So the opinions of those of you who've used Davinci Resolve, Unity/Godot, and/or FreeCAD. I want it to be stable with minimal down time on hardware with a AMD Ryzen 5 1600x and a RTX 3050. Here's the OS's I am looking at.
CentOS (alt Fedora)
- Pro: Recommended by Davinci Resolve for the OS, has good package manager GUI that separates Applications and System Software (DNF Dragon), Good support for multiple Desktop Environments I like. Game Support is excellent and about a few months behind arch.
- Con: When I last installed Fedora my OS Drives BTFS file system died a horrific and brutal death, losing all of my data. Can't have that. And I personally do not like DNF and how slow it makes updating and browsing packages.
Debain (alt Linux Mint DE)
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Pro: The most stable OS I've used, with a wide range of software support both officially in the distros package manager, or from developers own website. I am most familiar with this OS and APT
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Cons: Ancient packages which may cause issues with Davinci Resolve and Video Games. An over reliance on the terminal to fix simple problems (though this can be said for most linux distros). I personally don't like APT and how it manages the software.
EndevourOS (alt Manjaro)
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Pro: The most up to date OS, great for games with the AUR giving support for a lot of software which isn't available on other distros.
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Cons: Manjaro has died on me once, and is a hassle to setup right and keep up. EndevourOS has no Package Manager GUI, and is over reliant on the Terminal. Can't use pacman in a terminal the commands are confusing.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed
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Pro: Like Fedora but doesn't use DNF, good game support
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Cons: Software isn't as well supported.
Edit: from the sounds of thing, and the advice from everyone. I think what I’ll do is an install order while testing distros (either in distro box or on a spare ssd) in the following order.
Debain/Mint DE -> OpenSUSE -> EndevourOS -> CentOS
This list is mostly due to stability and support for nvidia drivers.
Just read about how they miss very important things time and time again, like they cannot learn from their mistakes. EndeavourOS is what Manjaro should be.
Making a stable distro out of Arch is a pretty difficult task. I think Manjaro is finally in a place where they achieved that goal but it was a rocky first few years. It also requires some cooperation from the user, if you do things like insist to use non-supported kernels or step out of the stable branch then it's not going to work well.
Endeavour has a less ambitious goal, it tries to improve on Arch with an installer and better defaults without changing how it works. It's not really comparable to Manjaro. I mean it's of course up to each person which approach they consider "should be" better but Endeavour and Manjaro are trying to do very different things and I think each has its place.
It's an ambitious goal without reason, just use fedora if you want a stable distro, why would you hack arch into something it simply isn't?
You realize their strategy for making it "stable" is just waiting two weeks and hoping it works? That isn't anything like what any good stable distro does.
The fact is, everything you're saying that you want the system to do, manjaro isn't even good at. And all the benefits you'd get from arch, manjaro ruins.
Either use endeavoros and enjoy the benefits of arch, or use fedora and enjoy a stable distro. Manjaro is neither and bad at both.
Standard release != stable. Fedora is closer to manjarno than to debian.
True, but it's still much more stable in the classical sense of unbreaking.
It's more stable in theory, but I've had bad luck with it. Nobara with Fedora 38 worked perfectly fine for the few months I used it. I installed Fedora 39 as a friend's first distro and it's still working without issues. For me 39 failed to boot after an update multiple times during the ~month I've used it, and there were constant small annoyances. For example it was rewriting journald entries for 5 mins almost every time it booted.
That's pretty Archy IMO. And that makes sense considering that it's only the second step in making a stable distro. Centos stream should be far closer to Debian, as it's basically Fedora LTS.
Fedora is all about being different nowadays, they're pushing all kinds of bleeding edge stuff and it's become an extremely opinionated distro. Which is fine if you vibe with what they're doing but makes it more complicated than "just use Fedora".
If we thought this way then most Linux distros out there wouldn't exist. "Why use [insert Debian derivative here]? Just use Debian."
I'm only going to say it one more time, Manjaro isn't Arch and doesn't have the same goals. If you want Arch, use Arch. It's not a zero-sum game, Arch doesn't lose anything by Manjaro existing, on the contrary, we all benefit from more distro diversity.
It is as simple as "just use fedora, or mint, or debian, or endeavoros, or arch" because guaranteed one of those will be better for your usecase than manjaro.
Actually, we do, manjaro is worse than one of those distros for every usecase, meaning manjaro just makes the ecosystem worse by existing, rather than better.
I understand manjaro isn't arch, but even if you don't want arch, there's something better in ONE of those distros for you, every time. Manjaro isn't the best at anything and it is the worst at a lot of things.