They all either use the Arch repos and add some of their own repos on top, or they're Manjaro which actively makes Arch even less stable because of version mismatch with the AUR.
There is no stable release distro based on Arch
theshatterstone54
joined 1 year ago
I've been hopping between Arch and NixOS for about a year, and I've been on Arch For a few months before that (wirh the exception of a few short-term hops to Ubuntu, Fedora, Starting off with Mint and ArcoLinux, And I almost stayed on Tumbleweed about a week ago but I couldn't figure out dnf5 (a few days later I was told that installing dnf was installing dnf5 so I just had to configure it properly). So right now I'm on NixOS, where SDDM broke last night and I had to switch to GDM, and with my recent switch to Emacs, NixOS keeps on throwing issues at me (and here I was, thinking NixOS could be my forever distro). Tumbleweed is missing a lot of packages I use, I'm tired of Arch, and I feel like NixOS is giving me problems every time I try it, so at this point, I'm at a loss.
Like, I'm seriously considering abandoning Wayland and everything, and just switching all the way back to AwesomeWM (my first window manager) with Jonaburg's fork of Picom (to give me Hyprland-like animations, rounded corners and floating bars) on Debian and sticking with it until we get Hyprland on Debian and then sticking to that. Alternatively, Fedora (even though I felt dirty using it after the whole redhat debacle, and hyprland and waybar weren't working the way they were supposed to). I don't know. I'm tired, I want all my stuff on a distro that I can just not update for weeks, because I'm often too busy or just forget, and where things just work (tm). So... yeah. That's the crap I'm dealing with.
TLDR: The only distros that have all the packages I need (I really, REALLY, don't want to compile anything if I can avoid it) are either, broken and problematic (NixOS for some reason), have slow package management and are missing packages (Tumbleweed) or do not have a stable branch (Arch AND Tumbleweed), meaning that when they aren't updated for weeks (as it often happens with my system), they can break (Arch).
So I distrohop cuz NO distro out there meets my criteria and works well for me. I just want Debian's stability with Arch's repos and AUR, so I can get Hyprland and all my (often not very popular) software I use, from the regular ol repos so I don't have to compile.
I want to settle on Debian Stable, I really do, but I use Hyprland, so I'll have to wait until we get Debian 13 (hopefully 13 and not 14 lol).
Wait, so installing dnf from the repos gives us dnf5? I had it!!! Whatever, I'm on NixOS now and I'm quite happy with it but I'll certainly keep that in mind if I ever decide to try Tumbleweed again.
Great, now how about we get zypper up to the speed and standard of otger package managers (parallel downloads and just being faster in general, like dnf5, or just introduce a way to make dnf5 an option fot Tumbleweed) to take it to the place it needs to be? OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is great. When Matt from The Linux Cast said Tumbleweed is amazing, I believed him. When he said zypper was too slow, my reaction was "surely it's not that bad, right?". Wrong. It is SUPER slow. Can we get a way to set up dnf5 on it? Thank you.
that is offputting for a lot of users.
I wanted to like Slackware, I really did, but you're right. It is significantly different and not necessarily in a good way (I'm not bashing Slackware, I'm just saying that Slackware is quite archaic in the way it does things, and that's not always the best way of doing things).
I don't think I will. I switch between Arch and NixOS constantly, and this time (I'm on NixOS right now) I intend on remembering distrobox is a thing if I need to compile from source.
Reading this, I find myself really, REALLY wanting to replicate that sort of setup, especially the docs part which is something I've been neglecting. I always say to myself, "The next Arch install, I'll document the setup" and it never happens!
Defaulting to it and dropping it are completely different, and seeing the pace of progress in the last year or 2 makes me feel very confident that Xorg will be abandoned by 2027.
I doubt Enterprise Distros will consider dropping Xorg
RHEL 10 is completely removing Xorg so....
There are only 3 options I can immediately think of, for you:
Debian
OpenSUSE (Leap)
Slackware
They are ordered from most to least likely to recommend for your criteria i.e I recommend Debian, alternatively Leap, and if you don't like either you can try Slackware, but Slackware is closer to a DIY distro.
Correction: they'll be dead with the next few years. If everything goes to plan by 2027, pretty much everyone will be on Wayland (Because in 2025, all surviving desktops and WMs will be completing full Wayland transitions, and we can give distros and users 2 more years to reflect that). While Xorg will be officially dead when it becomes abandonware after RedHat drops it in 2032 (when the last RHEL 9 version, 9.10, will stop being supported), Xorg will already be all prepped up for its funeral and burial years before then.
Well, here I am reading this message as I find myself yet again frustrated at NixOS for beng so different and I'm looking towards Tumbleweed, thinking, "Maybe"