pyssla

One was it being immutable, meaning for any software that wasn't in the flatpak store, I have to spin up a container running a mutable version and use that.

Sorry for being that guy, but please allow me to nitpick the above:

• Bazzite's founder and lead maintainer doesn't refer to Bazzite as immutable^[I'd argue it's their legit resistance against the common notion/understanding of immutability that doesn't apply to Bazzite.].
• Bazzite supports a lot more than just Flatpak and pet containers. And that list isn't even complete.

my only real point is that looking problems up on a small distro is harder

While I agree that Aurora definitely is a small 'distro'^[The uBlue team doesn't refer to their images as such 😅. Frankly, I agree that the daily pipeline their images go through to deliver system updates screams everything but the traditional model. To be clear, in uBlue's model, the daily-delivered base system is rebuilt from source every single time. So, my base system of Bazzite is identical to yours (unless either one of us created their own image).], I'm not comfortable to refer to Bazzite as a small project. Both Steam's own metrics as well as ProtonDB's suggest that it holds a moderate chunk. Sure, with just over 25k users it isn't quite comparable to (say) Fedora's 300k+ user base. But it definitely ain't a slouch either.

As for the looking problems up part, honestly, if a quick search doesn't help ya, you should just go over to their Discord or Discourse and ask the friendly maintainers and community for help/support. ~~Heck, even their subreddit seems to be doing a commendable job.~~

but I guess its a rather small distro that not many people know?

It's true that it's not as well-established as many of the other distros discussed here; it probably has like 1k users or so. Which is quite literally just a small fraction of Fedora KDE's over a 120k user base. Granted, it's a relatively new distro built on Fedora's latest/'future' tech. Usage numbers should follow eventually^[Based on Fedora's (current) intentions to default to said latest/'future' tech when the time is right.].

Thankfully, that same tech enables Aurora (and other projects like it) to be very robust and reliable; tangibly more so than the more popular 'traditional' alternatives. I assume you'll come to cherish and value this reliability, especially as stability seems to be a concern of yours.

This was originally intended as a longer comment, but the previous draft unfortunately blinked out of existence... Though, I'm more than willing to shed some light on the distros discussed below if you're interested.

Or any other Good KDE Distros out there.

I'm surprised that no one else has mentioned them yet. Thus, for the sake of completeness, consider Aurora and Bazzite. It's what I would personally install/recommend for/to relatives/friends that would like to make the switch to Linux.

Thank you for the quick response!

I don't know if raw package counts is the best comparison.

You're probably right. Do you think we got anything better to go by?

Unlike say Fedora, Arch bundles everything related to a project in the same file. If you want Qt6-base on Arch, that is one package. If you want it on Fedora, it is going to have a lib, header, docs, and maybe a few other packages.

Can't comment on this. Though, the list of packages with qt6 in their name is considerably longer in Fedora. However, I wonder if this simply reflects that Fedora, by virtue of having a larger repository, also has more stuff related to qt6. Or, as you posited it, chooses to package the same content over multiple packages instead of bundling them like it's supposedly happening on Arch.

Just from personal experience, I do not have issues with finding packages in the main repos, with only a handful of my packages coming from the AUR. This is not the case with others, like Fedora where extra repos need to be added, like EPEL and RPM Fusion.

Hmm..., I feel you might be conflating stuff. Please allow me to elaborate on what I mean.

Fedora is not able to include some packages in its own repository due to legal reasons. As such, these are relayed to RPM Fusion instead. Which means that a well-functioning Fedora installation (almost necessarily) desires to install some packages from RPM Fusion. So, RPM Fusion exists as a 'hack' of sorts to protect Fedora from legal charges and NOT because they're too lazy (or something) to ship those packages themselves. To be clear, RPM Fusion is accepted as a trusted third-party repository.

Arch, on the other hand, is rather lenient on what they can include in their repositories. Basically enabling them to package within their repositories all codecs and whatnot without them being visibly worried about the legal consequences of this ordeal.

To be honest, I don't know exactly where this discrepancy comes from. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's related to how Arch is basically a genuine community distro while Fedora has official ties to Red Hat.

Btw, small correction, AFAIK you're not supposed to install packages from the EPEL on Fedora. Perhaps you meant COPR (basically Fedora's AUR) or Terra instead?

The arch maintainers package more software than most other distributions.

Sorry, but I fail to see this.

I suppose if you're accounting literally all independent distros, then you're probably right. However, if we'd be more realistic and compare it to other well-established independent distros^[I'm basically counting Alpine, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE, Slackware, Solus and Void. I didn't count Guix System and NixOS for how their 'repositories' are built different and therefore not easily comparable to the others.], then we notice that the vastness of the packages found in Arch's repository is rather lackluster at the very least. Heck, by virtually all metrics, Arch together with its derivatives undoubtedly belong in the upper echelons of usage stats; only being second to the Debian-family of distros. IMO, however, the size of its repository absolutely doesn't reflect this; as it's only bigger than Slackware, Solus and Void. The inclusion of these smaller projects is arguably charitable on my side*. But to drive the point home very clearly: Arch's repository is smaller than Alpine's, Debian's, Fedora's, openSUSE's and Gentoo's with a ratio of (about) two to one (except for openSUSE).

Because, and I quote:

"Warning: AUR packages are user-produced content. These PKGBUILDs are completely unofficial and have not been thoroughly vetted. Any use of the provided files is at your own risk."

Thankfully, there's a mailing list that covers issues like these. Heck, OP's PSA was probably originally propagated from there.

I use secureblue, because it offers the (AFAIK unique) intersection between:

• a security-first^[To be precise, it's actually Linux-first and security-second. For an actual security-first approach, consider taking a look at Sculpt OS employed with the seL4 kernel run on ARM or 64-bit RISC-V.] approach while being fit for general computing
• a first-class citizen of the ~~'immutable'~~ reprovisionable, anti-hysteresis paradigm
• a well-maintained project with many active contributors that exhibit a proactive stance when it comes to implementing (security) improvements

Idk about the browser thing it was because the kde wallet or something? It stores passwords and the browser has a login so it would force me to do that every time. Same with email and such, very annoying. I think I have it all working fine now.

Ah okay, thanks for the clarification! I have heard of that interaction elsewhere. Unsure if it's KDE Plasma misbehaving or otherwise. Regardless, I'm glad to hear that you were able to resolve the issue. I did find this discussion (which you may have found yourself as well). In their case, they (somehow) didn't properly create an account, which opens multiple can of worms you'd much rather not deal with. Thankfully, the fact that you were able to deal with the problem suggests that you should be fine 😉.

Sorry for being that guy..., but, if this was meant as a general statement, i.e. Flatpak is currently incapable of PipeWire and necessarily forces PulseAudio on its current audience, then that's a false statement. I understand the confusion though; we don't find a toggle for PipeWire (within Flatseal or otherwise) while we do for PulseAudio. To expose PipeWire to a flatpak, add xdg-run/pipewire-0:ro right under "Other files" within the "Filesystem" section of Flatseal. Note that the :ro-part is probably not needed and perhaps even undesirable at times. Finally, note that this doesn't always work; some stuff simply don't seem to support this yet.

Off-topic: A meta-analysis if you will, but I'm just astonished by the engagement this post has received. I wonder what this tells us about the Linux community on Lemmy.

On-topic: OP, honestly, others have chimed in and left very good answers already. So perhaps you won't find anything within my comment that hasn't been said. But, as I'm a latecomer to this thread, I might have an advantage that some didn't (try to capitalize on). To be blunt, the original post didn't reveal much about what you liked and didn't like about Arch. As such, my initial impression would have been to suggest Gentoo. But, you've since provided the engaging community crucial insights that help us in grasping the full picture. Below you may find my own notes on your distro preferences based on what you said:

• care-free updates
• repo packages receive updates shortly after upstream
• rewards effort put into initial setup

Furthermore, I'll take the liberty to assume that (native) package availability is expected to be vast. And that you wish for the process of updating to be snappy.

Based on the above, I recommend NixOS.

If jumping ship to NixOS seems too daunting, then consider installing Nix^[To be clear, I meant the package manager. Determinate System's installer is probably your best option.] on Arch. Consider to slowly but surely expand its usage within your system. And, then, when you're comfortable, embrace NixOS as a worthy successor to your Arch installation.

Thanks for reporting back!

Pretty good so far

Glad to hear that it has been a pleasant experience overall!

few things took a while to figure out ...

The "force me to enter a password any time I open my browser"-thing seems like unintended behavior. Pretty strange. Glad to hear that it has been resolved, though.

sadly still one thing I probably won’t ever be able to fix is getting a program (combat mode for GW2) to actually work as it’s… like 13 years old and just lets me press a button to make my mouse left/right click into keys while the game is up. They have integrated the other functionality of it at least so it’s not THAT bad. Might be able to get my mouse to manually do that if I check out the drivers for it I think someone made.

Perhaps you've already undertaken what I'm about to say, so please feel free to ignore this if that's the case: Have you reached out to their Discord server in hopes of resolving the issue? While their documentation is pretty great, it's possible that it ain't sufficient. Whenever that happens, the Discord community can (and probably will (at least in my experience)) step up and provide excellent guidance when prompted.

What you gain in stability you sacrifice in flexibility and control.

While I don't completely agree on flexibility, I can at least understand where you're coming from; there's simply stuff you can do on traditional distros that have yet to be properly supported on the 'immutables'. However, even after giving it some genuine thought, I still don't quite understand how control is sacrificed. Would you mind elaborating?