Maybe what I’m looking for is the holy grail, but what do you guys suggest as a Distro with a good balance between stability and up-to-date packages?
Maybe what I’m looking for is the holy grail, but what do you guys suggest as a Distro with a good balance between stability and up-to-date packages?
From my personal experience you would want either Fedora or Arch Linux that’s not Manjaro (not b/c Manjaro unstable, but because it can become it if you use aur with their delayed package release).
I found Fedora to be my cup of tea for gaming though it is about 2 months behind arch in terms of packages.
Whereas Arch is relies more on the terminal to download, and update packages. EndeavorOS is a good distro to try for this, but it wasn’t my cup of tea especially on my laptop.
Fwiw I use BAUH on Arch as a graphical package updater which normally works well. Paru is easy to use on the cli
Out side of a few AUR packages which worked with PACMAN on the same laptop, BAUH was a good (but not as polished) package manager. TBH my main issue with Arch (outside of the laptop issue I already stated), was how terminal heavy the OS is.
I want an OS that’s easy enough to use that I can give it to my Grandparents, and not worry if they want to install new card games. I found that most problems in Arch (and debain now I think of it) are usually resolved by the terminal, and rarely is a GUI made to resolve these issues. While I had Manjaro, too many times did the package database file lock itself and never unlocked itself, so I had to fix it with the terminal. BAUH also doesn’t uninstall orphaned packages and doesn’t show me which packages are orphaned if I uninstalled something.
Thus far with Fedora I like that most of the Applications and Flatpaks are installed with KDE Discover/Gnome Software, while OS related packages like Vulkan Drivers, and Java SDK’s are behind DNF Dragon. The only time I had to use a terminal was when I was adding third party copr repos like for VSCodium, or CDEmu. I feel this could probably be done with DNF Dragon, it’s a one and done process.
With the way Redhat is acting lately I’d personally stay away from Fedora.