Honestly NIXos. Run it impermanent or traditional OS style. If your coming from Arch and want less breakage and more declarative configuration. Immutable or not. Pick almost any DE and all you maintain is your nix config. Nix config is your master file its not huge and the machine runs from it as you tell it. The machine does the rest. No system drift, no cruft. Just works and if you break it. Select your previous generation at boot and your back exactly as you were before.
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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Downside: it requires knowing a new coding language, Nix, to maintain your laptop.
If you don’t understand it, it’s going to be painful to fix anything that doesn’t work.
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vlc was already like this on arch for a long time, literally took just a moment to look at the optional dependencies and grab the latest "actually give me everything lmao" package group
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Opensuse tumbleweed or if you want to keep the arch featureset but with the rollback-ability of BTRFS check out CachyOS
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I've tried Endeavour (after failing miserably to do stuff in Arch) and ended up breaking it really bad.
I just went back to Fedora, and haven't looked back (in 3 months, until the distro-hop urge kicks in again 😁)
I've been using Ubuntu/Kubuntu since 2004 and I've always been happy and had very little problems.
It's a good, no hassle distro that works and is fairly up to date, especially if you use the non-LTS ones. I prefer staying with LTS though. At least my OS is stable and I don't have to spend my free time troubleshooting anything.
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Debians testing branch might be a good shout. Packages stay pretty up-to-date and usually stuff doesn't break. Worst case you can pull a package from unstable when needed.
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Fedora if you do not gain joy from troubleshooting
Debian sid if you do.