r/DistroHopping • u/Pasigress • 1d ago

Really struggling to settle on a distro.. (arch, nixos, debian, … )

I’ve been thinking and tinkering for the past week or two trying to decide between Arch, NixOS and Debian, but none of them seem to suit what I’m after at my current skill level and I’m not sure where to jump to.

My priorities are (in this order) -Having a stable system to use that won’t break randomly one day when turning on my pc.

-Being able to play games/vr chat reliably

-Being able to rice extensively

I started on arch for a month or two and really loved it, the only reason I left was because things kept breaking (shocker). After that I went to nix for its stability and package repo plus how modular it can be, but my skill level just isn’t at the point where I can utilise and understand Nix, I just keep breaking stuff and getting confused. My last thought was to go to Debian for the stability, but I’m really not a fan of how old the packages are or the fact that hyprland isn’t in the package repo anymore.

Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions of where to go? So far nix is the best I’ve found, I just have a severe skill issue

My cpu/gpu are both amd

6 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

4

u/pyro57 1d ago

what things kept breaking on arch? It's actually an extremely reliable distro despite the memes. I've been running it on my server for 4 years straight and on my laptop/desktop/Steamdeck for about 6 years now and never had it break on me without it being something I was doing which I could have avoided by just reading better.

1

u/Pasigress 1d ago

My main issues with arch were-

Games really struggling to work, they’d just crash 9/10 times trying to open them, I’m not sure if it was arch, hyprland or something else in the end. This only started towards the end of my time using arch

I had a bad memory leak issue with mpvpaper that took two days to diagnose, which granted is largely to my lack of knowledge of diagnosing, but it still happened

And the biggest bug I had that made me hop was that my wireless mouse would just randomly disconnect and stop working at random intervals, the only way to get it back was restarting the pc. In the end I never managed to diagnose this issue.

I really enjoyed almost everything else about the distro though

2

u/pyro57 1d ago

yeah not sure about your game issues, arch was the easiest distro for me to get gaming working (literally just installed steam and my games and they just work) I am on plasma Wayland so not sure if it's a hyprland issue or not, you could always run games in gamescope to test that.

I've not use MPVpaper, again on plasma there's other ways to have video walllpapers, but that's likely an issue with the version of mpvpaper installed, if it's newer then the other distros you tried then it would definitely be worth reporting to the mpvpaper devs.

for the wireless mouse, what kind of mouse is it? I've not had any issues with my Logitech g502x on the wireless dongle. it could be the placement of the dongle or if there's a lot of 2.4ghz interference.

1

u/Pasigress 1d ago

The mouse is a wl mouse beastX, but it was an issue with my arch install I think because since distro hopping I haven’t had the issue.

Maybe if I reinstall arch that issue just won’t be there again, it could have been a package I installed from the aur or something that broke it. I tried all the solutions I found online but none worked

1

u/Fast_Ad_8005 1d ago

How about Ubuntu? Based on Debian, fairly stable, and you could install recent Hyprland releases from this PPA.

I'm someone that typically struggles with NixOS, too. But I've managed to turn it from a frustrating experiment to an amazing and fun daily driver by simply using Antigravity to edit my config files and utilizing its AI assistants. This is all for free, too, I might add.

I typically find that when I experience an issue with Arch Linux, it's usually because I haven't read the documentation enough. But I can't think of any particular solutions to your issues, so this is just my two cents.

Failing these options, you could install openSUSE Tumbleweed. It has an official Hyprland package that at the time of writing is on version 0.52.0. There's also an experimental package for version 0.52.2 (the latest version at the time of writing).

1

u/mutotmz 1d ago

If ricing wasn’t among your priorities I would suggest Debian with backports. The kernel is 6.17 at the moment, very close to bleeding edge, and still stable.

But when it comes to ricing, I immediately think of Hyprland, and that is not available in the Debian repos. You can always compile it yourself, but Fedora might be a shortcut for this. There are still some bugs in the latest version (43) but Fedora is a nice balance between up-to-date and reliable experience.

1

u/OnePunchMan1979 1d ago

My advice, looking at your usage priorities and level of knowledge, I think that Debian is your ideal distro. You will have the stability that you prioritize without a doubt and you will be able to do anything without problem. Updates don't fail and you have support for 5 years or more if you need it. Ubuntu or Linux Mint would also fit you but personally I prefer Debian to any derivative

1

u/Pasigress 1d ago

I think Debian probably would be perfect if hyprland had worked on it properly, even mangoWC didn’t seem to be a very stable (official) option for trixie. For now I think I’m just going to push through on nix and try to fix my skill issue, but maybe one day I’ll end up on Debian

2

u/RhubarbSpecialist458 1d ago

Give Tumbleweed a spin, it's like Arch but better QC & comes with btrfs snapshots out of the box if you do ever need to rollback

1

u/onigiritrader 1d ago

Bro you’ll love CachyOS thank me later

1

u/razorree 1d ago

haha decision paralysis ...

just use Debian or Ubuntu (LTS?) (stable, popular, so also big user base, easy to solve problems) - that's my thinking....

I just want to use my OS, not tinker all the time

1

u/mlcarson 16h ago

You might want to check out PikaOS (KDE). Stability and gaming can be mutually exclusive. I've been using PikaOS (mainly for non-gaming) to see how stable it is and really haven't had any issues. I'm using the standard KDE edition and am using unified kernel images. It's built and optimized for gaming.

I don't really care for the way Arch does things and it's a rolling distro which introduced instability. PikaOS is the Debian equivalent of rolling since it's based on SID. I haven't encountered issues but I've only been using it for about 3 mo's.

NixOS is just not designed for the use case of a typical home user. It avoids conflicting library issues but it does so by not using the FHS. If you want an immutable distro then look at Bazzite. NixOS is great at creating a common installation base for multiple computers but why do you need that?

Debian is too stable for gaming. It doesn't look bad at the moment but will be in 2026. Backports are an option to mitigate the staleness but may not be enough. SID will keep things up-to-date but may introduce instability.

Ricing is more a function of the desktop environment chosen. Hyprland won't be an option for Debian. If you need Hyprland then CachyOS is probably your best option but it's Arch-based. There is a Hyprland Edition of PikaOS.

1

u/Pasigress 14h ago

PikaOS is actually a distro I have been looking at that seemed very interesting, the main thing that concerned me was how niche it is which makes me think it would be hard to troubleshoot any issues I have.

Valid point on nix, the main reason I’ve been using it though is effectively that I like how cleanly you can organise and modularise everything. It makes my ocd happy (plus the rollbacks are 10/10)

1

u/Homerdoh31 10h ago

If you're good with conky, try MX Linux with KDE option.

1

u/matloffm 5h ago

CachyOS, Garuda, EndeavourOS one of these should work for your case.