MX is also solid for older Nvidia cards. The installer tool picks patched drivers for you in case they are needed. This is mostly up to preference, I don't like CachyOS as much as I don't like the rolling release model.
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2026
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automatic hardware detection
I don't understand that point at all. How is Arch different in that regard & I'm asking this as an experienced Linux user managing multiple Debian & Arch boxes.
So I wanted to hear some experiences of you, that you may have had in the past considering EndeavourOS, CachyOS, Manjaro and Arch itself.
If you want to go down this road & are confident in your technical ability & mental fortitude to maintain such a system long term, then just go with vanilla Arch & go through the installation process once. The real difficulty of Arch is dealing with the every day minor & major breakages that come with updates. Learning something from the install procedure is actually helpful with that. The main point is that not only is the real difficulty maintenance, but none of the popular Arch flavors do anything meaningful to help with that. It's just you and the terminal at the end of the day. Saving a couple hours on the install process is not going to help you at all.
Manjaro is conceptually garbage ran by incompetent people so it's not even worth considering.
I personally have gone for Manjaro now, kind of hoping that it won’t break on the attempt to cut themselves of the company side of Manjaro and becomming they’re own non-profit.
Oh okay, oof. Let me explain then. Their concept of holding back packages by one week & still having / advertising the AUR means additional instability. This or that library or dependency gets an update & then the updated AUR package will break with your one week old stuff. Furthermore far more often than not they still push the broken package, because they would need a similar contributor base to main Arch to actually vet & test everything which they'll never have no matter what they do. What they call an additional safety net is almost never one. Sure if Arch pushed a broken grub update, that's like the one thing you could a avoid with Manjaro, but if you cannot fix / research such a problem (chroot or refind & reinstall grub), then you have no business using such a distro to begin with.
CachyOS is in a weird spot, but I cannot really recommend them, because they push new kernels too soon, to the point of ridiculousness.
EoS is vanilla Arch with a gui installer basically. It's barely a distro, but their community forums are great for new users to ask "dumb" questions. I can fully recommend every noob Arch user this community, they'll help you even if you are not using EoS, they've certainly helped & taught me a lot back then.
Garuda is the same as EoS, but there is some added graphical flare, which you can add yourself to any Linux system if you wanted to.
If you are a new user who is worried about old packages, then you should be using Fedora, that's pretty much it. Arch can be good too, but it's for a technical user who is really interested in Linux beyond just using their computer.
Ill put it this way; me and a mate switched to Linux as our main drivers at roughly the same time. Both of us have a background in development (him more), I switched to Fedora, he to Cachy.
It is now roughly two years later. He has switched his distro multiple more times. Im still on Fedora because it just works.
Arch based distros are for tinkerers and customisers. Sure it can just work too, but if you dont tinker then theres no real point/ advantage.
I'll advice you to go with Fedora, because rolling release distro often cause issues, but Fedora has not too old packages like Debian and gets major updates 2x a year, don't worry about driver and app updates you'll get them as you would on amy distro.
manjaro had a lot of issues with stuff as basic as their certificate.
i wouldn't trust them over endeavour or cachy and i've personally had a good experience on both of these.
IMO, Manjaro mostly just convinces people "Linux isn't ready" and sends them back to windows except for a select few gluttons for punishment.
I switched from EndeavourOS to OpenSUSE tumbleweed.
Not because EOS is bad, the contrary, i had a really good and smooth experience and probably only had one big issue, but my fault for not searching through EOS' forum xD, that caused a total wipe and fresh install.
EOS beeing arch based, you need to keep regularly your system up to date and keep your system clean ! Beeing bleeding edge is a double sword... That's why I switched to openSUSE TW, cause I needed something close to bleeding endge but also very stable for a hybrid server-gaming system.
This is also doable with EOS, but there's way more personal investement to keep it stable.
Would totally recommend EOS to someone who want to tinker and customize his/her system and learning a bit more about how UNIX system works on a deeper level.
Nothing against OpenSUSE tumbleweed, as I've heard great things, but I thought it was also rolling release, very similar to Arch...?
Bootable BTRFS snapshots and a less fast update schedule are the biggest differences AFAIK.
I would probably have gone with Slowroll if it was ready to go when I installed Tumbleweed.
It is, but the packages are slightly held back and therefore the system is more stable.
I personally have gone for Manjaro
Why would anyone intentionally do that?
The whole Manjaro concept of delaying Arch updates by two weeks is bullshit, because they don't actually use that time for additional tests or include fixes. They just ship exactly the same bugs 2 weeks later.
On top of this where Arch explicitly warns users about the AUR as unvetted community content and only lets you install AUR helpers manually (increasing the chance that people see the warning and think twice) Manjaro comes with their own AUR helper pre-installed. No warning, no nothing. Oh, and they use the unmodified AUR which is running under the assumption that you have an updated Arch system, not one weeks out-of-date. So welcome to breakages and dependency hell.
Said Manjaro-specific AUR helper also has ddos'ed the AUR on multiple occasions because they don't seem to believe in testing.
Have I mentioned the –by now meme-worthy– fact that they are too stupid to not let their SSL certificates expire and unironically proposed setting your PC's clock/date back as a solution?
Which distro would you recommend?
CachyOS, EndeavourOS or plain arch.
I've been using cachyos for a couple years and had no issues with it. For me it has enough 'out of the box' functionality to jump in, but also allows you do do whatever you want to customize it. I will always recommend it to people who have at least a bit of tech knowledge and just want to get started and not have to build everything from scratch.
most recommended was debian and debian based. But I for myself(Even though the post says otherwise) now chose to use an arch based distro
Why are you asking our opinion on the matter since you clearly have made up your mind already?
because of the better supported and newer nvidia drivers
Newer doesn't necessarily mean better, there's a reason other d'Ístria delay packages and it has to do with compatibility and finding early bugs.
as well as automatic hardware detection.
What? Debian based distros have automatic hardware detection, Arch expects you to know your hardware and install things accordingly. Hell, almost nothing in Arch is automatic.
So I wanted to hear some experiences of you, that you may have had in the past considering EndeavourOS, CachyOS, Manjaro and Arch itself.
I used Arch as my main distro for over 15 years, it's a great distro it has a lot of advantages in my book and it's still the distro I feel most at home with. But it's definitely NOT beginner friendly, you'll get the latest packages with the latest bugs and incompatibilities, sure you might get the latest performance gains, but that's when you're not facing the latest regressions in performance or in compatibility.
Don't get me wrong, I still love Arch and have it on some of my systems, but it's something that you have to know how to deal with.
I personally have gone for Manjaro now
If you must use Arch go with plain Arch. Manjaro and others essentially give you a pretty GUI installer, nothing more, and they cost you the customization of building your system from the ground up and knowing how to rebuild and fix if things go wrong for whatever reason (plus every Arch community will first ask what distro you're running, and if it's not pure Arch they won't even look at your post). Also worth mentioning, AUR packages are built for Arch, they might work on Manjaro or Cachy, but they might also not due to the slight version variations.
In short, I think Arch is a great system, but it has some difficulties attached to it that could potentially make it a problem for someone that wants something that "just works", which is what most new users want, whether they admit it or not.
I think everyone needs to stop positioning Arch as something complicated. It’s not. Every Linux distro has nasty moments, and you’re better equipped to deal with them when you understand what’s happening. Perhaps that’s difficult concept for a newcomer (the idea that you need to understand what you’re doing, at least to some degree). But apart from the will to learn, there’s nothing really difficult and complicated in there. I had so many weird little moments with Fedora (which I assume should just mostly work out of the box), that if I had no knowledge Arch helped me to gain, I don’t know what would I do. I’ve consider migrating home shared computer from Fedora to Arch, and not doing it simply because it’s still mostly works on its own, and the Arch magic for me is in the customisations I have made. Fedora gave me unbootable system more times (with me doing nothing! Just updating) than Arch with me tinkering with basically everything all the time, that I won’t even say Arch is some complex mess. Rather the opposite, I think. That’s why I think scaring the newcomers away may be the wrong thing. It’s not too difficult if you’ve arrived to this point already. All you need is to accept you would learn along the way, and Arch (and the community!) would help.
Re-read my post, and tell me where did I said Arch is complicated? My view is summarized in the last paragraph, and I can summarize it even more here "good, but not beginner friendly". Arch expects you to know how to deal with it, it expects you to read the news, it expects you know how to downgrade a package and it expects you're comfortable in a terminal. A newcomer is unlikely to even know about any of that, they already have to learn a lot of other things like package manager, learning what's the name of each program and how they behave slightly different from what they're used to, etc, they don't need to learn about pacnew/pacsave files on top of all of that. If you're already comfortable in Linux, yeah, Arch is amazing, but if you're presented with a terminal not even knowing what KDE/Gnome are you're going to have a bad time.
And that's the thing, it's not that it's complicated, but it's the unknowns unknowns that will get a new user, they don't know they need a session manager, they don't know they need a printer daemon, etc. And if you bypass that by using Manjaro/Cachy, you're now in a position of using a distro that expects you to know about that but didn't taught you about them.
Hey, sorry, I did not mean to argue with your very comment, but rather in general. Your comment is a nice addition to mine, by elaborating what the complexities are.
It’s just that it may be beginner friendly if the beginner is able to learn and explore (having time and headspace to learn those things). With Arch you have to know what you need, but apart from setting up the system, there’s nothing to learn. Say, I have never used KDE or Gnome on Arch, but I think I’d manage, if I’d need to. (I used them on Debian and Fedora, and on Arch I use only Sway, which I’m comfortable with.)
So, to someone, Arch may be the same thing as the Arch-based distro, considering that the person running it accepts they have to set their resources for learning this new system.
I started using Linux with Ubuntu (about 20 years ago), and I regret it. Wasted time. It was shite even back then. I’m not even interested in where they’re now. If I’d started Arch about that time (not sure it was around, maybe it was), or Gentoo as the friend recommended (in such a tone I got it that it’s too difficult for me to start with), I’d be in a much better place today. Instead, I used Debian and distro-hopped here and there. I’m mostly happy with Arch. I don’t run Gentoo because I don’t know it, and these days, in contrast to 20 years ago, I’m too packed with running errands that it rather sounds as a fun hobby project once nobody wants anything from me at least for a weekend, or better for a week or two.
I am pretty sure you can replace most Arch-based distros with a good manual (assuming it’s updated). Unfortunately, the Arch Wiki is nowhere near, but it’s something at least.
And probably a few scripts that automate typical setup and make it pretty can help too. You can even get many million dollars support from other rich guys, if you do that.
I think you're suffering a bit from this: https://xkcd.com/2501/
You know the feeling you have about Gentoo? That's the feeling for someone going to Linux, even to Ubuntu, the more complications you add the worse the feeling is.
Arch is not hard, it's not complicated, but there's a lot of unknowns unknowns that can bite a newcomer in the ass. If you're already familiar with Linux Arch is easy peasy, just like Gentoo, it's just some small things you have to learn.
Think about it this way, you're already familiar with 99% of what Gentoo will ask of you and still it's not something you're up for doing, imagine the frustration of not knowing what's anything and having to go through that.
After Archinstall many derivatives lost their appel.
You know the weirdest part? Arch used to have a TUI installer when I first migrated to it, it lost it at some point between 2009 and 2012 (since I discovered it didn't existed anymore on a laptop I bought in 2012. Weird that they redid an installer after all these years (and yeah, I know that technically pacstrap is an installer, but it doesn't do much)
After leaving Bazzite I jumped to Garuda. It was easy and I haven't had any problems. Things run good. Gaming runs good. Pamac runs updates when I shut down. Is good.
What caused you to abandon Bazzite?
With the advent of endeavor and cachy, I would argue there's zero point to using Manjaro. If you like the arch style and figure on reading updates to ensure things don't break, might as well be on a distro that's just arch nicely preconfigured with a nice installer.
Manjaro adds another later of complexity to that by holding some updates back for reasons, that as far as I've seen doesn't really do much in the way of helping stability.
I first dove into Linux March 2020 with Mint. The next day the pandemic lockdowns started. I hadn't heard about the pandemic at that point.
My internet was shut off a couple weeks later which made learning how to use Linux significantly more difficult. I had downloaded a wide variety of distro's though and had plenty of time to try them out but only had the man pages to learn from, which don't really make a lot of the connections I needed to get things working right on my computer, a Frankenstein's monster which had a lot of quirks and was made from parts salvaged from the trash or donated out of pity by friends. Oh and the CPU was partially delidded by a tornado and still works like a champ to this day.
I went from Mint to various Ubuntu's, played with a bunch of Puppy's, didn't care for Zorin or Fedora for unrelated reasons, almost settled on MX but messed something up, and long story short, I started using Manjaro KDE since September 2021 and have stuck with it. For my use case and equipment at the time, it just worked.
I've tried a few other distros, breifly, mostly in VM's and almost changed to Open SUSE Tumbleweed but ultimately stuck with the Manjaro. There have been a few frustrations along the way but the issues stemmed more from my low-budget equipment, corrupt and incompetant internet service providers and incompetant and corrupt monitor and cable manufacturers, than anything Manjaro did and some of those problems were solved by their (mostly) friendly forum people.
I got lucky and managed to find a way to build a new computer since then, a fairly decent one for a home desktop in my opinion. I don't foresee myself changing anytime soon. (New PC: AMD 7950XT; ASRock Taichi mobo; ASRock Radeon 6950 GPU; 128GB RAM)
I'm very sorry to inform you that ~~arch~~ manjaro is the worst of the three you mentioned. The distro is known to have stability issues on a regular basis so additional tinkering and fixing is required. Endeavour and Cachy are both excellent choices though, people here have reported that they're super stable.
I think you meant to say Manjaro
That's absolutely true
No issues here (: for years
because of the better supported and newer nvidia drivers as well as automatic hardware detection
What?
I don't understand why arch users always say this... It's still Linux? You can install nvidia drivers on debian or fedora, and most of the rest are baked into the kernel (most of the time), so I don't get this.
Of course you can install them, but you need to do it. I didn't say that it would be complicated or not possible, I just said that I really appreciated Manjaro for shipping the nvidia proprietary driver directly at the start without any trouble. And I did not say that I chose Arch-based for the nvidia driver, but for the more up-to-date drivers.
And I did not say that I chose Arch-based for the nvidia driver, but for the more up-to-date drivers.
But that's what I mean... It's not to do with being arch-based, but what the distribution chooses to ship. Bazzite is Fedora based and also ships with the almost-newest proprietary nvidia drivers.
For the record, I don't have an opinion on your choice of distro, use what works for you. I just see so commonly from arch users that they have access to the latest drivers, but that is true of anything running a recent Linux kernel. I was just wondering what about arch makes this belief so strong.
Arch is the distro for people who don't know enough to realize all distros are basically the same but want to feel like they "know Linux" because they have to fix a bunch of stuff (spoiler: you can just read manuals of things without having your OS randomly break them)
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Why Manjaro, though? Isn't CachyOS way more popular these days? And for good reasons?
I've been daily driving linux-based OS for about a year and a half now. I started with NixOS per the recommendation of a friend. It's great for stability and the config-based setup is super cool. I found the software to be a bit behind in updates and the way the nix store worked caused some hiccups with certain things I wanted to do. I still use it for my servers, but switched to CachyOS for my clients.
CachyOS has been great. I use the Shelly GUI to install all of the software. I have Nvidia (RTX 3080) and have had a really smooth experience. The one issue that sticks out to me is there seems to be an issue with switching from a single monitor setup (for sunshine streaming) back to my triple monitor setup including my 32:9 240hz monitor - this became an issue recently after some updates. Could be a KDE thing rather than CachyOS thing, though.
FWIW I know nothing about how to get regular arch working - I've heard it's a bit complex, but CachyOS has been anything but that.
as a longtime fan of looking at other people dotfiles and trying different setups, NixOS speaks to me on a spiritual level. Its dotfiles for your hardware AND software, all contained beuatifully in one place 99% of the time, and thats by choice even! You dont even have to do that much declaratively if you dont want to. Tons of automation tools have been developed, theres appimage support, etc.
can get annoying the first time you have to setup your own flake for a small project that doesnt have one, but once you learn it it goes from a real roadblock to an occational annoyance that i can personally totally live with.
wouldnt reccommend it to a first timer unless theyre a special breed. Enough fundamentals dont follow most other linux systems that its definitely an added struggle if youre also trying to learn those.
if your idea of FUN is heavily insipired by Dwarf Fortress as mine is tho, its the best thing since sliced bread
My Arch progression was like this:
Manjaro -> Arch -> endeavouros -> Garuda Linux
Garuda is awesome if you like Arch.
I love Garuda. I tried Bazzite and CachyOS, but I just keep ending up back on Garuda. I feel like it is the only one that really lets me just use my computer and not think about the OS when I don't want to.
I ran Manjaro for a few years. It worked mostly but I ran into issues sometimes on updates. Got tired of that so I moved to Fedoraworkstation and it’s been rock solid.
I tried CachyOS as my intro to Arch based distros (excluding Steamdeck's Steam OS) and it kept crashing on start up a day after installation. I switched back to Nobara at the time and everything important worked again.
The lesson: don't blindly trust the hype because people are full of shit and omit a lot of issues they experience.
You can also set up debian to be a rolling release-based distro as well -- which is comically easy to do. (All you have is to edit a text file and swap a word for "sid".). And it's as stable as you'd think.
t. Running Armbian (which is "debian for arm pc's"), rolling release. Been running (and updating) it since a while and not a single weird oddities happened (like crashes, instability, etc).
I use both EndeavourOS and Debian stable and I love them both for different reasons. The main thing about these Arch distros is updates: You can't really tell what's a security update and what isn't, so you either end up updating and relogging/rebooting a lot or not doing updates and being vulnerable. I wrote a script and systemd timer to check for updates for certain software (like browsers) and do them without updating the rest of the system so I can then update the rest of the system more infrequently.
Just enable nvidias apt repository and get whatever drivers you need directly from the source.
Made the switch from Windows to Cachy back in February because Microslop is getting way too invanse and creepy for my liking, and I don't see why I should be connected to the internet for programs as simple as Notepad. Its been a learning curve as someone who's never used Linux before but I actually find great satisfaction in figuring out the challenges that arise, and I can usually have a local LLM I use walk me through the solution as an effective learning tool. As someone who uses their PC for a decent amount of gaming on a regular basis, it's treated me well, and I find that it actually let's my system run better without all the unnecessary fluff of modern iterations of Windows.
local LLM I use walk me through the solution as an effective learning tool.
Which model do you use for that exactly?
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