this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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I realized my VLC was broke some point in the week after updating Arch. I spend time troubleshooting then find a forum post with replies from an Arch moderator saying they knew it would happen and it's my fault for not wanting to read through pages of changelogs. Another mod post says they won't announce that on the RSS feed either. I thought I was doing good by following the RSS but I guess that's not enough.

I've been happily using Arch for 5 years but after reading those posts I've decided to look for a different distro. Does anyone have recommendations for the closest I can get to Arch but with a different attitude around updating?

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[–] BETYU@moist.catsweat.com 20 points 1 week ago (9 children)

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.

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[–] scoobford@lemmy.zip 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'd recommend opensuse tumbleweed. Codecs can be a little weird, so I recommend installing a flatpak for VLC and your browser. Otherwise, I've found it to be a very similar experience.

[–] kylian0087@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 week ago

If it is the rolling aspect OP likes about arch. Then absolutely. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is amazing. But I do think something like Gentoo is more arch like in the sense that you got to do most things your self.

[–] Bogasse@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] RedSnt@feddit.dk 15 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The closest to Arch, a rolling cutting edge distro, is probably openSUSE Tumbleweed. openSUSE has excellent snapper integration that takes a snapshot before and after you touch zypper, so it's easy to undo changes that might ruin your system. CachyOS also has that same great snapper integration, but that's still Arch.

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[–] eugenia@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)

I prefer Debian-Testing. Basically, a rolling release, but not unstable. Arch is akin to Debian -Sid, which is unstable. The latest packages are brought in to -Sid after some rudimentary testing on -experimental. But only the stuff that make it and are solid on -sid, make it to -testing. Basically, Debian has 2 layers of siphoning bugs before they even make it to -testing. And that's why the -stable branch is so solid, because whatever makes it there, has to go through the 3 branches.

So if you like rolling releases with much newer packages, consider -testing. The easiest way is to wait for the Trixie release, and then do the manual update to -testing by changing the repository names (there are online tutorials about it). The other way is to get a -testing iso, but these usually are broken because most people "upgrade" their installed distro to testing instead of just install it outright.

I've been using -testing for over a year now with 0 problems. Even Google is using -testing internally! I also have had Arch installed and endeavouros, and have had 3 problems that I had to fix in 5 months.

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[–] rolandtb303@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

yeah i had that happen to me too, didn't look in the update screen because updates before went with a breeze but i took another look after VLC wouldn't play anything, it was something with the VLC plugins and i needed to reinstall those, just had to do sudo pacamn -S vlc-plugins-all to get VLC to play video files back, but man, that should have been in the news imo.

[–] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I had the same issue, hadn't found the solution yet (also didn't looked too hard) and while I sort of agree that it should have been in the news I also understand why it's not (it only affects people with VLC, and not everyone uses VLC, if every time a package gets split it was in the news the news would be all about that). That being said I think that there were other solutions that would have been much better, namely split the package with a mandatory dependency on vlc-plugins-all and convert that to optional dependency in a month or two, that way everything keeps working as is for people during the transition, but after a short while it can be modularized.

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[–] undrwater@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago (8 children)

Gentoo, honestly.

The community is much more friendly, the system is probably more arch than arch. The downside is compiling, but big packages have binaries now, and small packages build and install just about as fast as a binary distro.

Good hunting!

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[–] juipeltje@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] MetalMachine@feddit.nl 11 points 1 week ago (5 children)

People are not gonna like this at all but I've been using manjaro for years and it's been pretty solid for me.

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[–] KarnaSubarna@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Rule of Thumb: if your use case is not satisfied by your current Distro, then move to the one that does.

Arch or rolling release distros are great if you want latest version of software/packages as soon as possible. Downside is you need to put more effort/time to maintain it by yourself.

On the other hand, fixed release distros (e.g. Debian) doesn't offer latest packages immediately. But, given that packages are tested for distro release, so you will have a more stable (in relative term) system for yourself with minimal effort.

I used to like rolling release distros on my college days as I had plenty of time back then. Now, I'm settled on fixed release ditro as it suits my current use case.

[–] Cenotaph@mander.xyz 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Opensuse tumbleweed or if you want to keep the arch featureset but with the rollback-ability of BTRFS check out CachyOS

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[–] lcb@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 week ago

I had the same problem, i did start with arch ,but man i remember doing a update after 4 days(4Gb of new updates) and my system faild to boot. From that moment i went debian route.

[–] mactan@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

vlc was already like this on arch for a long time, literally took just a moment to look at the optional dependencies and grab the latest "actually give me everything lmao" package group

[–] Ricaz@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 week ago

Yeah I can't believe he's been using Arch for 5 years and didn't even bat an eye over the massive pacman output

[–] slaveOne@reddthat.com 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

You can mitigate this with Timeshift

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[–] Admetus@sopuli.xyz 8 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

Honestly NIXos. Run it impermanent or traditional OS style. If your coming from Arch and want less breakage and more declarative configuration. Immutable or not. Pick almost any DE and all you maintain is your nix config. Nix config is your master file its not huge and the machine runs from it as you tell it. The machine does the rest. No system drift, no cruft. Just works and if you break it. Select your previous generation at boot and your back exactly as you were before.

[–] markstos@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Downside: it requires knowing a new coding language, Nix, to maintain your laptop.

If you don’t understand it, it’s going to be painful to fix anything that doesn’t work.

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[–] cyborganism@piefed.ca 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I've been using Ubuntu/Kubuntu since 2004 and I've always been happy and had very little problems.

It's a good, no hassle distro that works and is fairly up to date, especially if you use the non-LTS ones. I prefer staying with LTS though. At least my OS is stable and I don't have to spend my free time troubleshooting anything.

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