Endeavour OS. It's solid.
I don't recommend Manjaro. Its delayed release but no testing methodology has caused me grief a number of times. I still run a VM with it on it, but the only VM OS that has had more issues was windows
Edit it's /its
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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Any of them that use the Arch repos directly are probably fine. Don't use Manjaro.
I will say that Arch does now have a guided installer, so you don't need to do everything manually. Here's the wiki page for it: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall
btw I use arch
How come you say Manjaro is not recommended? I went straight for Arch years ago so I don't know what's wrong with the derivatives.
Any other derivatives are fine AFAIK, just not Manjaro. There's quite a bit out there about why you should avoid Manjaro. This source is older, but I've linked it before: https://github.com/arindas/manjarno
The link seems rather outdated.
It probably is. I think there are newer examples available, but I lack the motivation to find them for others. I feel it still represents the fundamental issues with Manjaro, if not the current specific ones.
It’s had a few security issues in the past and last I heard they introduce a lag between packages going into the arch repos and things being available in Manjaro - even for critical security updates.
Arch. No I'm not being a troll or suggesting something bad.
The reason I suggest Arch by itself is because of ArchInstall script. From there, it's simple to use.
Learn to use pacman, and maybe an AUR Helper like Paru or Yay.
Arch Wiki is quite robust.
Agree. I went from Ubuntu to Arch many years ago and everything I read in the installation guide was new to me, yet I managed. "So can you!" If I did it...
why do you want it to be arch based in particular? the entire point of an arch based distro is that you're rawdogging it.
if you want something simple, use something Ubuntu/debian based. if you want something more complex, just try arch, it's not that hard
The AUR I guess?
EndeavourOS is great.
Expect a bunch of people in comments who will deliberately recommend default Arch
Arch
Any of them that use the Arch repos directly are probably fine. Don’t use Manjaro.
Manjaro or Endeavour.
Just base arch
Garuda
Steamos
Artix + OpenRC
CachyOS
EndeavourOS and nothing else.
I suppose that pretty much covers the full gamut.
EDIT: Here's the Linux distro family tree:
https://github.com/FabioLolix/LinuxTimeline/releases
It lists 19 still-living Arch-based distros. Disregarding category-based recommendations and looking only at explicitly-named recommendations, as of this writing, you've explicitly been recommended 7 so far, or over a third of what exist. :-)
Expect a bunch of people in comments who will deliberately recommend default Arch instead of answering your question.
I've been using EndeavourOS for a few years now, and haven't had any problems with it.
😊👍
EndeavourOS and nothing else. I personally use Cachy but it's way too unstable for a beginner.
Been a long time since I used arch or it's derivatives, in what way is cachyos less stable?
It broke many times on me, including a full ext4 file system breakage.
Just base arch
Read the description
No :3
I understand you have a point here but man the toxicity is crazy.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ if they want arch, just the base one is the best one
I don't really see why you'd install one of the other arch based ones tbh
People are afraid of the prospect of any slight inconvenience (even if there is none)
Then they should buy a Mac
Stupid reply.
There is massive spectrum of options between macOS and Arch Linux.
Why are you discouraging personal growth, trying out new things, overcoming challanges and fears?
None other than base Arch.
If you don't know enough about Linux, that's the point, installing Arch will teach you. Manually, not with archinstall.
Steamos.
Fight me.
Can it be a pillow fight?
I use steamos btw
Manjaro or Endeavour. I have and appreciate immensly both of them, and a slight preference for Manjaro due its release cycle.
CachyOS.
May be an unpopular opinion but I'm loving Garuda. I'm not a wizard and I needed something to just work with all the goodies. Garuda does it for me.
What do you like about Garuda?
Well when I was testing out distros last year, I wanted updated KDE, Wayland, BTRFS, Snapper, full LUKS (including the boot partition) and I wanted it all somewhat complete and configured with a GUI installer. I had spent way too much time mucking around in the CLI with Fedora trying to get all of that and I was over it. Garuda just delivered. I didn't know much about Arch at that time but man, it just works so well. All the issues I had with Debian and Mint and Ubuntu and Fedora, they just aren't a problem with Arch. And Garuda has it all configured out of the box. I'm sure there's some bloat in it - stuff that's included that I don't need. But I'm just happy everything I want is in there and I don't need to figure it out
Interesting, I don't use Linux on desktop (I've been using it on various Raspberry Pi SBCs since 2017 or so), but I am thinking whether to finally switch because Win11 sounds like a pain.
I was always under the impression that most Arch-derived distro were not really user friendly.
I feel that. Windows gives me the creeps since 8.1. Recently I setup a new Win11 machine and it took all day to get everything configured including figuring out how to turn off all the telemetry and spyware. I'll use it for work but I don't even like it on my network.
Arch from scratch sounds like an adventure. But there are many good arch spins like Garuda that make it easy, no drama.
Arch from scratch sounds like an adventure.
I enjoy front-end configuration (Win11 doesn't allow the taskbar on top, a non starter for me), for everything else around the OS/DE, I want zero adventures. I want it to be as boring as possible.
One other big issue for me is that it seems the last version of Office that works somewhat well via emulation (Codeweavers) is Microsoft Office 2013. This is ancient release and there are lot of must have features in later releases if use Word/Excel/Powerpoint in a professional capacity.
Artix + OpenRC is my favorite. Lighting fast, low resources, and has everything I need.