Hi, I was here and asked about a few distros already, so here’s a quick summary of my situation:
I’m thinking about what distro to put onto my new Laptop, which will be used for University, Work, and just general daily usage. I am currently using EndeavourOS on my main PC and have been decently satisfied, but I want to experiment more. I’ve already asked if Arch was fine for this situation, to which the answer was a general “Yes, but keep x in mind” and I’ve asked about NixOS, where the answer was generally a no.
I’ve been looking around a bit more, and now I’m kind of curious about Fedora, specifically the KDE spin (or i3, I haven’t quite decided). It seems to be cutting edge, compared to Arch’s (and by extension EndeavourOS’s) bleeding edge, and I’m wondering what you all think of it. From what I can gather it has basically all traits which people used to enjoy in Ubuntu, before Canonical dropped the ball on that. While it’s not rolling release, the stability improvements and user experience compared to something like Arch, or even a more comfortable fork like EndeavourOS, seem quite decent, but in your experience, does that make up for the lack of the AUR and reduced applicability of the Arch Wiki?
I’m curious to hear about your experiences and recommendations!
Edit: I feel like I need to clarify, I know about the difference between EndeavourOS and Arch, I mostly just brought it up as a note that I am somewhat familiar with arch-based systems, and as a question of if it’d be stupid to just go with raw Arch, as EndeavourOS is basically the same, but with a more comfortable installer. I should have specified that more clearly in the first place, my apologies.
If you want close to the bare minimum of software needed to run a system, and setup everything exactly as you like it, use arch.
If you want a preconfigured system that is performant, stable, secure, but still able to be customized to your liking, use Fedora.
If your scared of using a comand line for installation, use EndeavorOS.
I have used all 3 of these, in some capacity. I run my servers on Fedora Workstation, because it just works and comes with properly configured sepolicies out of the box. Arch has been the daily driver on my desktop/laptops for almost a decade now, because I often like to experiment with new programs and replacements for commonly used software, and the arch wiki is a wonderful. I tried EndeavorOS on an old PC to play YouTube videos/stream on my TV and it worked fine. I had to uninstall a handful of apps it came preloaded with, but that’s easy enough with an arch base. But IMO, now that the archinstall tool exists and is officially supported, there is actually no reason to use EndeavorOS unless you really don’t want to type a couple commands into a command line.
Erm, what? EndeavourOS is terminal-centric and you have to do almost all package management has to be done from the command line (unless you install lazy pamac as your first step). It’s also preconfigured like Fedora as you’ve said. EndeavourOS automates sane DE package defaults for you while AFAIK you still have to install Arch DEs on vanilla Arch.