tldr; it's ultimately up to you, but I can give you my 2¢
These days, my primary concerns when choosing an OS are:
1) how easily can I find the software I need to get work done?
2) how quickly can I troubleshoot issues I run into, so I can get back to work ASAP?
3) to what extent does the OS allow me to configure my system to my liking?
With these criteria in mind, I've been really happy with Arch
Arch Linux
Pros
very large, active community of users - there's almost always a solution to whatever issue you might be trying to troubleshoot
great official repos + thousands of community-maintained packages in the Arch User Repository
rolling release - with regard to number 2 up above: Sometimes, I've found that little issues / minor bugs just kind of "work themselves out" as I regularly update my system.
pacman, my favorite package manager ever
really nice and simple, once you get the hang of it
Cons
no installer; there's a bit of a learning curve.
you might not get things just right the first time.
can be a bit of a "timesink" OS if you're not careful ;)
If you're curious, I'd highly recommend grabbing an .iso and giving it a try in a virtual machine. You could probably get the hang of it in one weekend.
I don't recommend a derivative like Antergos or Manjaro - they work fine for some people, but I think you're ultimately better off taking the time to learn Arch.
If you're not up for learning Arch now, I'd recommend either Solus or Ubuntu. Last time I used Solus I was really impressed with it, and would probably install it I wasn't using Arch
You probably can't go wrong with Ubuntu - the community is really big + really supportive, and there's a lot of good software in the repos. I was actually using it for a couple months. It was pretty nice overall, but I had a lot of issues with some Snap packages, and found myself building Slack, DataGrip and others from source. Eventually, I realized it was time to go back to Arch.
Installing arch is trivial.
Much easier than installing Docker (in a proper way that doesn't give it root access and where it doesn't store its images and filesystems on the root filesystem)
Choosing an AUR client is also harder than installing Arch by manual.
hmm I mostly thought that Arch isn't that stable and all so I parted my way from that learning curve. Thank you for sharing you experience and yeah I am definitely going to first try it in Virtual Box.
Arch is "stable" as there were very few broken packages in years - I used arch from 2008-2016. And one or the other was broken, but not worth mentioning on a global scale.
OTOH, I am using OpenSuse Tumbleweed for 2 years and had no broken package. If you want to say, you coukd argue it beeing more stable: 0 is less than one broken package or so.
It's pronounced Diane. I do data architecture, operations, and backend development. In my spare time I maintain Massive.js, a data mapper for Node.js and PostgreSQL.
Another point in Arch's favor is that the wiki is some of the best documentation available for Arch and for Linux in general. But it is a bit of a commitment if you just want your operating system to run things for you.
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
I went with Manjaro a year or two ago after having been a debian user for years. I've ended up stripping out all the Manjaro-specific stuff and am basically running Arch. From an general user's point of view I don't think I'd see a lot of difference once you get to a desktop.
Up til today I don't get my head around the decision to dismiss their installer. Although only having a curses interface, arch had at least for years an installer.
Ditching it, because of KISS or whatever nonsense reason is beyond my capabilities to understand.
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tldr; it's ultimately up to you, but I can give you my 2¢
These days, my primary concerns when choosing an OS are:
1) how easily can I find the software I need to get work done?
2) how quickly can I troubleshoot issues I run into, so I can get back to work ASAP?
3) to what extent does the OS allow me to configure my system to my liking?
With these criteria in mind, I've been really happy with Arch
Arch Linux
Pros
Cons
If you're curious, I'd highly recommend grabbing an .iso and giving it a try in a virtual machine. You could probably get the hang of it in one weekend.
I don't recommend a derivative like Antergos or Manjaro - they work fine for some people, but I think you're ultimately better off taking the time to learn Arch.
If you're not up for learning Arch now, I'd recommend either Solus or Ubuntu. Last time I used Solus I was really impressed with it, and would probably install it I wasn't using Arch
You probably can't go wrong with Ubuntu - the community is really big + really supportive, and there's a lot of good software in the repos. I was actually using it for a couple months. It was pretty nice overall, but I had a lot of issues with some Snap packages, and found myself building Slack, DataGrip and others from source. Eventually, I realized it was time to go back to Arch.
Installing arch is trivial.
Much easier than installing Docker (in a proper way that doesn't give it root access and where it doesn't store its images and filesystems on the root filesystem)
Choosing an AUR client is also harder than installing Arch by manual.
hmm I mostly thought that Arch isn't that stable and all so I parted my way from that learning curve. Thank you for sharing you experience and yeah I am definitely going to first try it in Virtual Box.
Arch is "stable" as there were very few broken packages in years - I used arch from 2008-2016. And one or the other was broken, but not worth mentioning on a global scale.
OTOH, I am using OpenSuse Tumbleweed for 2 years and had no broken package. If you want to say, you coukd argue it beeing more stable: 0 is less than one broken package or so.
Another point in Arch's favor is that the wiki is some of the best documentation available for Arch and for Linux in general. But it is a bit of a commitment if you just want your operating system to run things for you.
I went with Manjaro a year or two ago after having been a debian user for years. I've ended up stripping out all the Manjaro-specific stuff and am basically running Arch. From an general user's point of view I don't think I'd see a lot of difference once you get to a desktop.
I can't stay away from Arch. I drink the arch coolaide and contribute a few AUR packages. Arch on the home and CoreOS+Docker for the clouds.
Up til today I don't get my head around the decision to dismiss their installer. Although only having a curses interface, arch had at least for years an installer.
Ditching it, because of KISS or whatever nonsense reason is beyond my capabilities to understand.