Linux

If you don't want to get into the rabbit hole that is NixOS (which is a distro i also like), then i would say void linux, if you still want that arch minimalism. Void is a rolling release, but it's more like a slow roll if that makes sense and focuses on stability. It's package manager is also rock solid, fast, and can update even when the system hasn't been updated in ages. If you've done a manual install of arch before, you'll probably breeze through the install process as well, since it is a guided ncurses installer.

I've been an Arch user for more than a decade and I'll usually be first in line to defend it from dodgy claims about unreliability.

But that forum response is bizarre. Literally the last two RSS items right now are about how splitting packages will require intervention for some users (plasma and Linux firmware). VLC is an officially supported package, and surely this change would impact almost every VLC user?

New opt-depends is a nice pacman feature, but it hardly implies that things have been removed from the base package.

After having a similar feeling as yours I went for NixOS.

My thoughts then : if it breaks I can rollback, and the unstable channel is quite comparable to what arch offers.

Now : I've moved to stable channel, because it's updated enough and allows me to only deal with breaking changes twice a year. Moving to NixOS was time consuming (but fun) because it required to rewrite all my dotfiles and learn something new.

I'd recommend opensuse tumbleweed. It's still a rolling distribution, it still has more bleeding edge software, but its package manager, zypper, does atomic updates, so if something doesn't install right it rolls it back.

https://endeavouros.com/ https://garudalinux.org/ both arch based maybe you will like the forum style better and they will probably also give you this information.

Based on what you describe, I would strongly recommend going with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It's just as bleeding-edge as Arch, but all packages go through automatic testing to ensure they won't break anything, and if some manual actions are required, it will offer options right before update. Moreover, snapper in enabled by default on btrfs partitions, and it makes snapshots automatically before updates, so even if something breaks somehow, reverting takes a few seconds.

One small footnote is that you'll need to add separate VLC repo or Packman for VLC to have full functionality - proprietary codecs are one of the rare things official repos don't feature for legal reasons.

On Arch rant: I've always been weirded out by this "Arch is actually stable, you just have to watch every news post for manual interventions before every update, oh, and you better update very often" attitude.

Like, no, this is not called stable or even usable for general audience. Updating your system and praying for it not to break while studying everything you need to know is antithetical to stability and makes for an awful daily driver.

I also noticed vlc has broken (installed last week apparently)

Using the pacman syntax:

pacman -Q -i -d vlc

showed a conflict with the vlc-plugin (which appeared to be uninstalled already) and no vlc-plugin-#### installed.

The dependencies were fully explained in the list, including the vlc-plugins-all dependency. I'm lazy so that's the dependency I installed on my EndeavourOS.