this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2026
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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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[–] iByteABit@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 weeks ago

I used to experiment around with various distros some years past until I got into Arch. Haven't distro hopped once since, I've completely erased Windows from my life and I'm gaming exactly as I would if I was on Windows. I never have trouble finding a package since almost everything exists either in the official repositories or in the AUR, and I get the latest versions with all the new features and fixes. Rarely some things do break because of the rolling releases, but it's almost always just a matter of a single google search to fix. For me it's worth it for having all the latest versions of everything.

My opinion would be different for a server or a work laptop where stability is much more important. For servers I would pick Debian for sure, for work laptop I'd consider Fedora probably