pyssla

This was originally intended as a longer comment, but the previous draft unfortunately blinked out of existence… Though, I’m more than willing to shed some light on the distros discussed below if you’re interested.

Or any other Good KDE Distros out there.

I’m surprised that no one else has mentioned them yet. Thus, for the sake of completeness, consider Aurora and Bazzite. It’s what I would personally install/recommend for/to relatives/friends that would like to make the switch to Linux.

Thank you for the quick response!

I don’t know if raw package counts is the best comparison.

You’re probably right. Do you think we got anything better to go by?

Unlike say Fedora, Arch bundles everything related to a project in the same file. If you want Qt6-base on Arch, that is one package. If you want it on Fedora, it is going to have a lib, header, docs, and maybe a few other packages.

Can’t comment on this. Though, the list of packages with qt6 in their name is considerably longer in Fedora. However, I wonder if this simply reflects that Fedora, by virtue of having a larger repository, also has more stuff related to qt6. Or, as you posited it, chooses to package the same content over multiple packages instead of bundling them like it’s supposedly happening on Arch.

Just from personal experience, I do not have issues with finding packages in the main repos, with only a handful of my packages coming from the AUR. This is not the case with others, like Fedora where extra repos need to be added, like EPEL and RPM Fusion.

Hmm…, I feel you might be conflating stuff. Please allow me to elaborate on what I mean.

Fedora is not able to include some packages in its own repository due to legal reasons. As such, these are relayed to RPM Fusion instead. Which means that a well-functioning Fedora installation (almost necessarily) desires to install some packages from RPM Fusion. So, RPM Fusion exists as a ‘hack’ of sorts to protect Fedora from legal charges and NOT because they’re too lazy (or something) to ship those packages themselves. To be clear, RPM Fusion is accepted as a trusted third-party repository.

Arch, on the other hand, is rather lenient on what they can include in their repositories. Basically enabling them to package within their repositories all codecs and whatnot without them being visibly worried about the legal consequences of this ordeal.

To be honest, I don’t know exactly where this discrepancy comes from. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s related to how Arch is basically a genuine community distro while Fedora has official ties to Red Hat.

Btw, small correction, AFAIK you’re not supposed to install packages from the EPEL on Fedora. Perhaps you meant COPR (basically Fedora’s AUR) or Terra instead?

The arch maintainers package more software than most other distributions.

Sorry, but I fail to see this.

I suppose if you’re accounting literally all independent distros, then you’re probably right. However, if we’d be more realistic and compare it to other well-established independent distros^[1], then we notice that the vastness of the packages found in Arch’s repository is rather lackluster at the very least. Heck, by virtually all metrics, Arch together with its derivatives undoubtedly belong in the upper echelons of usage stats; only being second to the Debian-family of distros. IMO, however, the size of its repository absolutely doesn’t reflect this; as it’s only bigger than Slackware, Solus and Void. The inclusion of these smaller projects is arguably charitable on my side*. But to drive the point home very clearly: Arch’s repository is smaller than Alpine’s, Debian’s, Fedora’s, openSUSE’s and Gentoo’s with a ratio of (about) two to one (except for openSUSE).

Because, and I quote:

“Warning: AUR packages are user-produced content. These PKGBUILDs are completely unofficial and have not been thoroughly vetted. Any use of the provided files is at your own risk.”

Thankfully, there’s a mailing list that covers issues like these. Heck, OP’s PSA was probably originally propagated from there.

I use secureblue, because it offers the (AFAIK unique) intersection between:

• a security-first^[1] approach while being fit for general computing
• a first-class citizen of the ‘immutable’ reprovisionable, anti-hysteresis paradigm
• a well-maintained project with many active contributors that exhibit a proactive stance when it comes to implementing (security) improvements

Idk about the browser thing it was because the kde wallet or something? It stores passwords and the browser has a login so it would force me to do that every time. Same with email and such, very annoying. I think I have it all working fine now.

Ah okay, thanks for the clarification! I have heard of that interaction elsewhere. Unsure if it’s KDE Plasma misbehaving or otherwise. Regardless, I’m glad to hear that you were able to resolve the issue. I did find this discussion (which you may have found yourself as well). In their case, they (somehow) didn’t properly create an account, which opens multiple can of worms you’d much rather not deal with. Thankfully, the fact that you were able to deal with the problem suggests that you should be fine 😉.

Off-topic: A meta-analysis if you will, but I’m just astonished by the engagement this post has received. I wonder what this tells us about the Linux community on Lemmy.

On-topic: OP, honestly, others have chimed in and left very good answers already. So perhaps you won’t find anything within my comment that hasn’t been said. But, as I’m a latecomer to this thread, I might have an advantage that some didn’t (try to capitalize on). To be blunt, the original post didn’t reveal much about what you liked and didn’t like about Arch. As such, my initial impression would have been to suggest Gentoo. But, you’ve since provided the engaging community crucial insights that help us in grasping the full picture. Below you may find my own notes on your distro preferences based on what you said:

• care-free updates
• repo packages receive updates shortly after upstream
• rewards effort put into initial setup

Furthermore, I’ll take the liberty to assume that (native) package availability is expected to be vast. And that you wish for the process of updating to be snappy.

Based on the above, I recommend NixOS.

If jumping ship to NixOS seems too daunting, then consider installing Nix^[1] on Arch. Consider to slowly but surely expand its usage within your system. And, then, when you’re comfortable, embrace NixOS as a worthy successor to your Arch installation.

Thanks for reporting back!

Pretty good so far

Glad to hear that it has been a pleasant experience overall!

few things took a while to figure out …

The “force me to enter a password any time I open my browser”-thing seems like unintended behavior. Pretty strange. Glad to hear that it has been resolved, though.

sadly still one thing I probably won’t ever be able to fix is getting a program (combat mode for GW2) to actually work as it’s… like 13 years old and just lets me press a button to make my mouse left/right click into keys while the game is up. They have integrated the other functionality of it at least so it’s not THAT bad. Might be able to get my mouse to manually do that if I check out the drivers for it I think someone made.

Perhaps you’ve already undertaken what I’m about to say, so please feel free to ignore this if that’s the case: Have you reached out to their Discord server in hopes of resolving the issue? While their documentation is pretty great, it’s possible that it ain’t sufficient. Whenever that happens, the Discord community can (and probably will (at least in my experience)) step up and provide excellent guidance when prompted.

It has been my pleasure fam! Enjoy your ride on Bazzite and please consider reporting back on how it went 😉.

I get the impression you’ve been enticed/subjected to some confusing technical jargon without noticing. Please allow me to shed some light.

Idk, there so much “mint and Debian are stable” but like… what’s the even mean?

Stable can mean a bunch of different stuff that may or may not be closely related. In the case of Debian, it’s the name of its default release; the one in which packages are frozen for two years except for security patches. (Note that this naming scheme is not unique to Debian.) As such, a Debian installation will be unchanging for these two years, earning its stable designation (which, to be clear, just meaning unchanging in this context). Finally, this unchanging environment should provide a ton of stability (i.e. stuff just works), which is also referred to as stable. These three distinct meanings of stable are probably the ones you’ll come across the most.

Is fedora 42 or bazzite going to be crashing regularly? Cuz… I doubt it?

The bold part is a clear demonstration that you understood stable to mean strictly robust; i.e. the third meaning discussed above. And to be clear, Fedora does a decent job at providing a reliable experience. (Bazzite even more so.) But not all three meanings of stable apply to it:

• For Fedora (and thus Bazzite by extension), the only stable repository is the one used to create its ISOs (i.e. the images used for installation). Beyond this, some packages are frozen within a release/version; e.g. you’ll never get a major release update for GNOME unless you do a major release update for Fedora. But…, that’s basically it; (almost) all other packages receive regular updates. As such, Fedora is often referred to as a semi-rolling release distro instead (as opposed to Debian being referred to as a stable release distro). So, to be clear, Fedora and Bazzite are NOT stable in this context.
• As (most of) its packages receive regular updates, it isn’t unchanging either. And thus, NOT stable in this context as well.
• However, in terms of offering a robust/reliable experience, Fedora is pretty good. Bazzite is even better due to its atomicity^[1] and the superior distro-management allowed by the bootc model.

So, to answer your question, Fedora and Bazzite will not crash regularly. And, while Fedora might fall a little short of providing as robust of an experience as you might find on Debian and Linux Mint (assuming you won’t FrankenDebian your installs), Bazzite may actually rival (and perhaps even eclipse/surpass) Debian and Linux Mint in this respect.

Seems easier to just go with fedora 42 or bazzite or whatever

For your purposes, I agree that going for the Bazzite-route seems to be the easiest.

but now idk what bazzite being immutable even means for what I can’t change and why that’s a big deal so idk.

This is a nuanced discussion that probably deserves more attention, but I’ll keep it short for the sake of brevity. In Bazzite’s case, strictly-speaking, immutability refers to how most of /usr’s content isn’t supposed to be changed deliberately by you. This is enforced by the system (in part) by making those files read-only.

In practice, though, there’s very little you actually can’t do with the system:

• AFAIK, you’re forced to use GRUB; which AFAIK is the most used bootloader anyways. Here’s a thread discussing support for systemd-boot.
• No support for UKI at the moment. But progress on this has been accelerated (relatively) recently; a presentation from just two weeks ago about the subject matter.
• The situation around dkms/akmods still ain’t great and leaves a lot to be desired; you’re basically limited to the ones found here. Thankfully, this is something else that’s actively being worked on.
• While installing from Fedora’s repository through bootc/rpm-ostree is possible, it’s actually discouraged in Bazzite’s case. Thankfully, there’s a plethora of different means to the same end. Furthermore, sysext have come a long way and might become our go-to eventually.