Linux

A few paragraphs would do wonders for the legibility of your post.

I've been wanting to try out NixOS for this very reason lately (although I don't break my system often). If everything works for me there, I'll switch to it.

Ive been a long term windows user. Almost 80% of my life. Tried macos and linux but always went to windows. Last year, i decided to move away from big tech in general. Ive moved away from most of it except windows, which is windows 10 LTSC. I tried ubuntu, kubuntu, fedora gnome, fedora kde, kde neon, arch (failed hard), arctix, endeavour and lastly i settled with linux mint cinnamon. A couple of tweak and a few hours. It feels like home. Goodbye windows, you will not be missed. I do dualboot windows 10 whenever i need to use program that only support windows.

Basically every distro is based on either arch or debian (some exceptions). I've been perfectly happy with debian, even as a gamer.

Debian. I've had installations which went trough several major version upgrades, I've worked with 'set and forget' setups where someone originally installed Debian and I get my hands on it 3-5 years later to upgrade it and it just works. Sure, it might not be as fancy as some alternatives and some things may need manual tweaking here and there, but the thing just works and even on rare occasion something breaks you'll still have options to fix it assuming you're comfortable with plain old terminal.

I've been distro hopping for years. After each time trying a few distros, I always find myself coming back to Linux Mint (cinnamon desktop environment). It has everything I need, and just works beautifully out of the box. It might not be flashy or have the latest cutting edge features, but it's stable.

I'm currently running the Debian edition of Mint (LMDE), and wishing I was back on standard Mint. Nothing major, but a few minor persistent issues that never happened on Mint.

I did try NixOS (immutable OS), but it didn't seem to have support for all the apps I wanted. I gave up fairly quickly, so you'll probably have more success.

Mint. It's not sexy. But it always just works. Never had an update break anything. I've got an Nvidia card, which ppl said was notorious for not working with Linux, it just works. The installer just reached out and grabbed the appropriate drivers, so easy. Have yet to have a steam game not work.

10/10 would recommend for anyone.

Linux Mint. As an alternative: any kind of BSD is going to be pretty stable.

First to answer your main question if I were you I would try NixOS, because it's declarative so it's essentially impossible to break, i.e. if it breaks for whatever reason a fresh reinstall will get you back to exactly where you were.

That being said, I know it's anecdotal but I have been using Arch for (holy crap) 15 years, and I've never experienced an update breaking my system. I find that most of the time people complain about Arch breaking with an update they're either not using Arch (but Manjaro, Endeavor, etc) and rely heavily on AUR which one should specifically not do, much less on Arch derivatives. The AUR is great, but there's a reason those packages are not on the main repos, don't use any system critical stuff from them and you should be golden. Also try to figure out why stuff broke when it did, you'll learn a lot about what you're doing wrong on your setup because most people would have just updated without any issues. Otherwise it really doesn't matter which distro you choose, mangling a distro with manual installations to the point where an upgrade breaks them can be done on most of them, and going for a fully immutable one will be very annoying if you're so interested in poking at the system.

Wow, what a wall of text. I'm sorry but I'm sure I skimmed some parts.

Look. The bulk of the replies you're going to get will be like "this is my favourite distro and here's how it works for you" not "this is the best distro for your criteria." It's important to understand the deep level of bias you're going to get.

But your cause is a noble one. I use a particular style of distro because it can be trusted to install well, back out well, do both safely, and allow validation at every stage. I think it's a good candidate, and it's already been mentioned as a really great 'set it and forget it' distro.

Good luck.

I used Fedora, and am now leaving for the exact reason you're leaving Arch (plus IMO bad repos). Switched to openSUSE Tumbleweed a few months ago and am having a much better experience than with Fedora :D; I use the PC for programming, audio recording and mixing, document stuff, etc. (No gaming though).

Nobara is good but does break regularly, FYI... If you're a "power-user" I wouldn't recommend it as a daily driver.

There's also Void Linux, which hasn't ever broken on me due to an update, but is still a lot of work, due to its nature. It's actually quite stable though, and you might enjoy it, since it's quite similar to Arch and has very large repos.

I can't say much about immutable distros, as the only one I've used is bazzite, which was kinda horrible (broke constantly).

Well, I hope that helped. Good luck!

i'm trying out Aeon at the moment. it's from the opensuse people.

it auto-updates, it snapshots itself so any failed update will just silently revert, and it does flatpaks or distrobox only.

if you're okay with gnome, try it.

Look. I've been there. I started my Linux journey with Arch based distros, then distrohopped a lot, and finally found the best for me, and what I personally consider the best either for normal users or those that don't want to do any maintenance.

It's the Universal Blue family of distros: Bazzite (gaming / KDE / gnome) Aurora (standard / development / KDE) Bluefin (standard / development / gnome)

Set it and forget about it. It just freaking works. For GUI apps install from the Discover app store (which uses Flatpak), for cli apps use Homebrew (brew install whatever). If you can't find something, open Distrobox (already included) create an Arch container, install whatever you want from the AUR, and use it like you're used to. It works like freaking magic.

If somehow you manage to brick your installation, when you reboot you'll be able to boot to a past snapshot.

You just can't fail with this. It's the best of the best IMHO.

I stopped using Arch a long time ago for this same reason. Either Fedora (or derivatives like Nobara) or an atomic/immutable distro (like Bazzite, Silverblue, Kinoite) is probably the way to go.

I used to feel like Ubuntu was a good option for this, but it no longer is: too often they try to push undesirable changes that need manual tweaking to fix after release upgrades. Debian Stable is generally good for low-maintenance use but doesn't keep up as well with newer hardware or newer updates to video drivers and mesa, which makes it suboptimal for typical gaming use. Debian Testing can be prone to break things in updates (in my experience, worse than Arch does).

I saw another comment recommend Rocky/RHEL, but note that their kernel doesn't support btrfs. Since you mentioned a root snapshot, I expect you probably use it.

Look, this is the reason people pay RedHat money. Go install Rocky Linux, turn on all the automatic updates and ignore it for the next five years.

On the enthusiast side, NixOS seems to be working fine if you want newer versions of software or larger repos.

Fedora Workstation has been really good in my experience. The available software is shockingly up to date and I haven't run into much breakage of any kind in the year or so I've been using it across 2 systems (despite my best efforts every few months when the urge to tinker hits me). I do occasionally run into issues caused by the default SELinux policies, but they're not especially difficult to work around if you're comfortable using the terminal.

I do share your sentiment about the AUR - I definitely miss it at times. That said, Flatpaks and the fact that pre-built RPMs are so commonplace have both softened the blow a lot.

I came from Arch to Fedora as well but using Universal Blue's images. In my case, Aurora (KDE), and daughter's Bluefin (Gnome). They update in the background and only install when you reboot. So far, most of the newer software releases such as web browsers or the desktop environment fall within a day or two for being installed which is a nice alternative. The big plus I see on these too is they are immutable so if something installs or breaks, you just boot into the previous version from Grub and go from there.

Additionally, OpenSuse MicroOS has options for whatever environment you are used to such as Gnome or KDE, this is immutable as well. I view all of these as "Set and Forget".

My favorite distros are Gentoo and Debian.

I can say with confidence that Linux Mint is what you're looking for.

Could some of the instability issues you have on arch could come from what you are installing from AUR?

I use AUR for a few things and it is a great resource but the packages are maintained by users and can cause issues.

I update those packages carefully, remove them if I am no longer using them and reconsider which ones i actually need installed in the first place.

While doing this I have only had a handful of issues pop up while updating and usually there is a recent thread describing the issue and how to fix it after a quick search.

Bazzite