Linux

Based on what you describe, I would strongly recommend going with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It's just as bleeding-edge as Arch, but all packages go through automatic testing to ensure they won't break anything, and if some manual actions are required, it will offer options right before update. Moreover, snapper in enabled by default on btrfs partitions, and it makes snapshots automatically before updates, so even if something breaks somehow, reverting takes a few seconds.

One small footnote is that you'll need to add separate VLC repo or Packman for VLC to have full functionality - proprietary codecs are one of the rare things official repos don't feature for legal reasons.

On Arch rant: I've always been weirded out by this "Arch is actually stable, you just have to watch every news post for manual interventions before every update, oh, and you better update very often" attitude.

Like, no, this is not called stable or even usable for general audience. Updating your system and praying for it not to break while studying everything you need to know is antithetical to stability and makes for an awful daily driver.

OpenSUSE TUMBLEWEED, always updating, but they have an OpenQA tool that checks the builds for success, and if for some reason something did go bad you just reboot and pick the previous (automatic) snapshot. Lots of GUI tools to manage the system and packages via the various Yast2-GUI apps.

I've been an Arch user for about 15 years now, and I've never posted to the forums. Not because I'm great at this and don't break things. I constantly break things and need to fix them. I don't ask questions there because before you'll get any help you are going to get sat down and explained (in great detail sometimes) how you are the stupidest piece of shit on Earth.

Arch is really for those who like to troubleshoot and actively maintain things when they break.

I’m pretty decent with linux and for the most part, I can fix arch when it breaks, but I don’t have the time for that. For that reason, I use Fedora and recommend mint.

The same thing happened to me. The package was split into separate packages. Install the package vlc-plugins-all.

sudo pacman -S vlc-plugins-all

Problem solved

Fedora, great blend of bleeding edge and stability. Plus Linus uses it, so what better praise could you get.

I can totally understand that. In case you still want to give it a chance, I can highly recommend EndeavorOS. It's basically pre-styled, pure Arch. But it has a welcome dialog, where you have a warning banner at the top if you need to be careful regarding an update. This directly links you to their Gitlab and forum with the steps you'd need to take to not break anything. This saved me multiple times already and I never broke my system, despite not even reading the Arch RSS feed or changelogs.

Besides the EndeavorOS forum is waaaay friendlier compared to the Arch one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment

Someone should inform whoever made that change. If a package is split in a new release, the initial state should match the final as closely as possible, in this case by installing the new optional dependencies automatically. (Although I'm not sure why they'd want to split everything out like that anyway; no other VLC distribution does that, so splitting is itself a violation.)

Maybe Manjaro might be an alternative? I haven't personally used it. I don't like this kind of surprise, so I stick to boring distros like Debian. I used to use CentOS but it was too boring.

I've been an Arch user for more than a decade and I'll usually be first in line to defend it from dodgy claims about unreliability.

But that forum response is bizarre. Literally the last two RSS items right now are about how splitting packages will require intervention for some users (plasma and Linux firmware). VLC is an officially supported package, and surely this change would impact almost every VLC user?

New opt-depends is a nice pacman feature, but it hardly implies that things have been removed from the base package.

I got burned by something like this on Manjaro when a rolling update completely borked my graphics card. The devs reacted in a similar way and it made me realise that my priority is stability over bleeding edge and tinkering.

On that day I moved to Fedora. Stable as hell, no fuss. My main OS should just work and not kill itself.

I still love it but jumped over to Bazzite Gnome recently, which is like Fedora with a few bells on top, coupled with having a read-only root-filesystem (stability, man!). It also comes with distrobox, which will let you run arch natively in a container if you need the AUR.

Sorry for not answering your questions, I haven't used arch before. But dang that sucks I've been wanting to try arch for a little while but I didn't know they would happily push updates they know will break certain programs.

Ah yes, the issue with modern Linux, the community.

I feel the shift to the current "git gud" style of blaming the user in any support has done more damage to Linux then any part of the software.

I use Debian, for the stability.

https://endeavouros.com/ https://garudalinux.org/ both arch based maybe you will like the forum style better and they will probably also give you this information.

I'd recommend opensuse tumbleweed. Codecs can be a little weird, so I recommend installing a flatpak for VLC and your browser. Otherwise, I've found it to be a very similar experience.

After having a similar feeling as yours I went for NixOS.

My thoughts then : if it breaks I can rollback, and the unstable channel is quite comparable to what arch offers.

Now : I've moved to stable channel, because it's updated enough and allows me to only deal with breaking changes twice a year. Moving to NixOS was time consuming (but fun) because it required to rewrite all my dotfiles and learn something new.

The closest to Arch, a rolling cutting edge distro, is probably openSUSE Tumbleweed. openSUSE has excellent snapper integration that takes a snapshot before and after you touch zypper, so it's easy to undo changes that might ruin your system. CachyOS also has that same great snapper integration, but that's still Arch.

IMHO the actual problem here is the Arch moderator being an ass.

This happens in all operating systems from time to time. An update kills an app. Usually, the app is wildly out of date and hanging on to the last vestiges of a deprecated call that finally gets removed. I recently experienced this with V4L (for OBS virtual camera) and a kernel update in NixOS. Had one hell of a time tracking it down. It was one of the twice-yearly OS upgrades. Luckily, I had only updated one of my devices, and it still worked on the old one. After tearing apart the changes, I was finally able to specify V4L and a Linux kernel version. Immediately, the problem popped right out. The new kernel now needs a specific value passed for the expected video stream, where it used to use a default if it wasn't specified.

Apple breaks apps all the time. Windows does, but less so. The difference is usually before an update happens, Windows and Apple have had TONs of people testing on their own teams and their insiders people.

In the end, I just needed to roll back the kernel one revision until the V4L guys make the change, or I needed to recompile V4L myself with the option defaulted to something useful.

I don't think you can safely get away from this kind of issue. (app incompatibility on upgrade, not mods being an ass)

Debian or Mint seem to be pretty welcoming and easy going to get rid of the asshole issues, but chances are, you're going to break something eventually, and it's going to be super hard to figure out why and how to get around it.