Whelp, here I am. Been an Arch user for over 10 years now, and to this date I love it. But something is bothering me lately. Almost two years ago I jumped ship and completely switched to Wayland (using Plasma first, then Sway). I tasted modernism with all its features and it was sweet. But those last two years were a timeframe where I had to troubleshoot quite a lot compared to before where I used XFCE which was a very stable and reliant experience.
I am at a stage in my life where I do not have the time, nor the energy anymore to troubleshoot problems on a regular basis. I am now almost afraid of installing updates, because something new could fail again. But I cannot go back anymore. Wayland is too sweet.
So although I still love Arch, maybe it is time for me to look for something else which gives me more ease-of-mind. I am specifically looking at immutable distros now since the concept seems to be exactly what I am looking for (stable, low maintenance, up-to-date packages, easy rollback). But I am a bit lost with the options and hope that you can help me with some recommendations.
- I mainly browse the web, watch movies, game, do some scripting and run qemu VMs
- I am comfortable with the terminal
- I don’t do fancy customizations
- I don’t like GNOME
Distributions that I find interesting so far:
- Aurora
- Bazzite
- NixOS
I am still trying to wrap my head around what the differences between NixOS and the other two are. Afaik, with Nix you can configure your system once (including what packages you want to use), save this configuration in a file, and load it up whenever I need to set it up again. And it seems to have the same concept of updates, such that you can easily roll back if needed. But it seems to be aimed more at professional users and that I might overshoot at what I was aiming for. So for someone who likes to setup a system once and then just wants to use it indefinitely without too much maintenance what would your recommendation/advice/critisism regarding my situation be?
Edit: thank you guys so much for all your recommendations and thoughts! After some further analysis I decided to install Bazzite for the following reasons:
- shares a lot of similarities with other Atomic distros
- but has all the nice gaming related things pre-installed and configured and it uses a properly pre-installed Steam (not the Flatpak version) (the main reason why I chose it over Aurora, which would have been my next best pick)
- my qemu virtual machines run perfectly fine (also the shared folder)
- some dev stuff already pre-installed (don’t think I need more than there already is)
- fast and the OS feels like made out of one block, very consistent
- I was ready to use my machine like I want to in basically no time
- I already love the atomic way of handling updates
- so far no issues
The only thing left for me to do is to figure out how to properly install SyncThing and Zerotier-One, then I am absolutely set.
I’ve been on endeavour+plasma over a year now.
I share your desire for a system that always, 100%, every time, is there and ready to be used.
At the same time, I really like arch and the convenience of the AUR.
Hence, I boot-strap reliability onto my system through btrfs snapshots.
The setup is extremely simple, (provided your install is grub+btrfs) just install timeshift + the auto-snap systemd services. Configure it, and forget it.
Next time something breaks, instead of spending time on troubleshooting, you timeshift back to a known good point and then just get on with using your system.
With the auto-snap package installed every update also creates a restore point to go back to before it.
In addition to that, I started updating my system less frequency. The logic being that the more often you update a rolling release install, the more likely you are to catch it at a time when something is wrong, before it is fixed. Still regularly, but instead of every other day, I now have an update notification that goes off once a week.
The result has been zero time spent troubleshooting my system. If it worked yesterday, it’ll work today. If it worked last week, but doesn’t today, I’m a reboot away from a known good snapshot.
Hi, I’m about to install Timeshift on my clean EOS install. I used manjaro before and it used to snapshot before installing. Is that auto-snap the thing that does that and where does one get it from?
Thanks!
Yes.
Just do
yay timeshift, then install all three packages that show up.Timeshift itself is one, autosnap is a second, and the third is a systemd timer that handles the scheduled snaps (monthly, weekly, etc).
Thanks!
This ready like an almost atomic distro, haha. Good job! Also sounds interesting, so definitely something that I will consider! Thank you very much for sharing!
The functionality is conceptually identical, yes.
And timeshift is by default set up such that only / is rolled back while /home is kept as-is.
So same as atomic distros, rolling back doesn’t mean going back in time in terms of personal files or settings.
So I’m really only missing out on the updates for something like Bazzite being potentially more reliable.
I had my first fuck up with openSUSE+Gnome a couple of weeks ago when impatient me killed my laptop in the middle of like 1600-updates. BRTFS was the only reason I didn’t rip my hair out and the primary reason I will be switching my daily driver gaming rig to Linux, finally! That FS is the tits!
It’s funny, I update Endeavour daily because there’s less to go wrong at a given point
Oh, for sure. If you wait a month, the bigger update can be a lot more trouble.
But look at it like this. If a rolling distro has a problem once a week, which is fixed within 24 hours, updating daily guarantees you will run into it.
While updating weekly means your chance is only one in seven. Since because by the time you update, the fix is more likely to already be in the repos, so you’ll be jumping over the problematic update.