You seem to have already tried something and didn’t liked it, what was it and why?

I feel most newcomers often overthink this question. You should pick something aimed at newcomers that’s meant to be user friendly, that’s the main idea behind most Ubuntu based distros, and why I have been recommending people to use Mint for almost two decades, and that’s still my recommendation for new users.

There are lots of things to learn when migrating to Linux. The main one is to not expect it to be Windows. But most distros are essentially the same, their differences are mostly philosophical rather than technical, but philosophical differences can have technical impacts. For example, a distro with the philosophy that things need to be tested before given to users will have a smoother but outdated experience than one with the philosophy of latest is best, or for a more extreme example, a distro with the philosophy that your system should be declared as a configuration will require much more different kind of maintenance than one where it’s more install things around to build your system.

Finally there’s one thing that I think most new users don’t realize, any distro can look like any other distro very easily. The difference between distros is not cosmetic, it’s much more engrained into the core of how to use the distro, but most day-to-day stuff is identical. The graphical part of a Linux system is called a Desktop Environment (DE) or a Window Manager (WM), technically a DE is a full set of programs that includes a WM. I would strongly recommend you start with a DE, installing multiple DEs and playing around to figure out what you like is an excellent idea, personally I like Plasma even though I don’t use it daily because I prefer tiling window managers (possibly not something to worry about now), but other people prefer Gnome, Cinnamon, etc, play around and figure out what you like, this will have a much larger impact in your experience than changing distro.

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.

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.

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)

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.

Interesting, how are you dealing with pacnew/pacsave files? From your explanation it seems that they would go into the read only filesystem and would need to be resolved manually and preserved there until some old version cleanup is ran.

And while I find the idea of a writable overlay filesystem for the /etc fascinating, I think that could have issues with some rollbacks and backwards incompatible config changes.

At the end of the day seems like a fascinating project, but I wonder if Arch+snapper wouldn’t be better overall.

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That’s an interesting idea, but if you make Arch’s root read only you’re leaving behind pacman/AUR (and to a good extent the Arch wiki) which are usually the main advantages of Arch based distros.

SteamOS solves the stability issue by providing runtimes for games, I didn’t read anything there about anything similar on your distro. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems you’re not solving the stability issue, or in other words you will still be unstable as this will be a rolling release. In short I don’t see what would be the advantage of this over base Arch + Snapper (or timeshift).

In that regard, how is this different from Bazzite? I know it will be a different kernel and package versions but in principle the philosophy seems to be exactly the same, and I don’t expect the kernel/packages to be that different either.

What makes you think Google knows who you are? Just because it recommends videos you’re interested? Have you considered your interests might be average?

If you’re not logged in, using a system where you never logged in, connecting through Tor as you said google has no way of tracking you, so either one of those is a lie or you think it’s tracking you when it isn’t.

What do you mean? If you login the site has to know who you are, if you don’t then it won’t. What makes you think it knows who you are?

It comes pre installed, the question should be the other way around: why change the system? And I don’t think those two are sufficiently different to justify it unless you want to use the deck mainly as a PC.

That’s good, didn’t knew that but that’s a very smart move from them. Even so, that’s IF they know about that, also it only fixes the immediate issue of broken system, not the fact that you need to know what to do to not break it.

Cachy works great, it’s essentially a preconfigured Arch, but Arch issues for new users was never the installation process.

I’m very weary of recommending Arch distros to new users, Arch expects you to read the news and breaks stuff. 99% of the time for experienced users it’s fine, but new users tend to touch random configs when exploring which prevents pacman from upgrading them, and they won’t read the news to know about possible issues.

And before someone says Cachy is not Arch, it is, for this purpose it is, it suffers from the same thing by reason of being a rolling release that uses the same package manager. Just because YOU haven’t experienced a problem doesn’t mean it’s not there, I also have never experienced a similar problem with over a decade of Arch as my main distro, but it happens and you have to be blind to say otherwise.

Some tips for you:

• Check game compatibility using https://www.protondb.com/ this will let you know if the games you want to play run on Linux and how well they do so

• Buy an AMD GPU, support for Linux is great on them, miles ahead of nVidia. If you already had an nVidia card it’s usable, but if you’re starting fresh 100% AMD.

• Don’t fret too much on the distro of choice, not sure how familiar you are with Linux but because of the questions I assume not much. If this machine will also be used as a normal computer prefer a general use distro (my recommendation would be Mint), if you’ll plug it on the TV and use it as a console prefer a gaming distro (I’ve heard good stuff about Bazzite but never used it myself). You can have / and /home be different partitions, this means that you can distro hop and maintain your games, saves, and most configs from one distro to the other, or even when reinstalling the system, I strongly recommend people to do that.

• Linux is not windows, things are done differently and that’s okay. A lot of the frustration of new users comes from trying to do things the windows way and failing miserably, e.g. trying to install programs/drivers by navigating to a random web page and downloading a binary.

Good luck, and ask any more questions you might have.

Really? Never heard of that, which games did Valve did that?

Simple, look at what they invest the money in. Valve pays Proton developers and Linux support, GoG makes some ads about no DRM and invests something on preservation of games, Epic invests money on suing other companies and getting exclusives. Decide which of those is more important to you and spend money there.

Yeah, Gentoo is really good, but I dropped it the day I needed to edit a system, so I installed GIMP (there was no binary for it at the time), a few hours later I tried to open the image and realized I had forgotten to add the libpng (or similar) flag so didn’t had the support for the image type. Took me less time to install Arch than it would have taken me to recompile Gimp.

I fell for the Arch/AUR trap for a while, but I got tired of spending my weekends debugging file manager crashes instead of maintaining my home lab.

What sort of file manager crashes were you having?

Pacman doesn’t fetch from the AUR.

Yeah, I can see that. But I don’t think that knowing Ansible will teach you that difference. OP seems to know enough about Linux to be comfortable so I would expect him to be able to distinguish between those.

I agree that Nix has a steep learning curve and it’s not for everyone, but OP specifically asked for a way to declare their system, and Ansible doesn’t work for something you’ll setup now to use in 6 months when you decide to reinstall the system, because the best case scenario is you get your system as it was 6 months ago, but more realistically it doesn’t work and you have to spend time fixing it or doing it manually.

Don’t get me wrong, Ansible is great, I manage my home server with it, but if I go a while without running the pipeline when I do it rolls back several changes I made manually to test and forgot to consolidate. Nix is annoying because it forces you to declare everything every time, but you’re guaranteed to get the same result you have now, which is very important for the case OP asked about.