I am currently using Windows on an older HP Laptop, which I intend to replace with a Framework 16 by next summer, but my Desktop PC at home has been running EndeavourOS, my first ever Linux distro, since last summer, so I have some Arch-based experience.
As a learning experience I’d like to install raw Arch, but I’m wondering if it makes sense as a primary OS on something that should be a stable system, since I intend to use the laptop for university. I am planning on using btrfs and timeshift, so it shouldn’t break too horribly, even if something goes wrong (and I don’t wanna jinx it, but so far my EndeavourOS pc has been entirely fine too, so I didn’t even run into such an issue yet), but depending on who you ask Arch is either the most stable distro they’ve ever used or bricked their pc ten seconds into the install process.
So now I’m curious on if you all think this is a stupid idea or if it should be fine. Should I try installing Arch and then for actual use replace it with another distro like Debian LTS, NixOS or something like Mint on a machine which fulfills a more critical role than my PC at home, or should I be alright rolling with Arch on my uni laptop?
As a side note, what’s your take on using Arch vs EndeavourOS? It’s roughly the same fundamentally, so is there any point in using Arch apart from the learning experience and being able to say “I use arch btw”? My reasoning for actually wanting to use it and not just wanting to set it up for the learning experience and then switching off to EOS or something entirely different is “I think it’s neat”, which is hardly a good reason long-term.
Laptop is fine as a tinkering device, but if you have something critical it’s best not to trust a rolling release. I would recommend Fedora Silverblue or something else immutable that automatically updates and does not have a lot of incompatibility issues.
Arch is not something to be relying on consistently. You can make it stable, but then one day you will do a yay -Syu and all of a sudden your critical machine is offline pending troubleshooting that is not required with more stable distros.
EOS is the best out of the box Arch experience I’ve had, it makes it a lot more user friendly than just the base, and it can be customized just as much as the base. When I was running Arch I was running EOS and it was good for what I needed, although I have had it basically brick itself with an update. I am currently running Fedora Silverblue on my laptop and it’s been very stable.
you don’t use yay do you
Edit: typing
yaywithout any other argument defaults toyay -Syuso there’s no reason to type it outI guess I didn’t know yay by itself as a command was an alias for pacman -Syu, guess I’ve just always been redundantly using -Syu.