1d ago

Looking for a "set it and forget it" distro

Hi all, Relatively long time Linux user (2017 to be precise), and about two 3rds of that time has been on Arch and its derivatives.

Been running Endeavour OS for at least 2.5 years now. It's a solid distro until it's not. I'd go for months without a single issue then an update comes out of nowhere and just ruins everything to either no return, or just causes me to chase after a fix for hours, and sometimes days. I'm kinda getting tired of this trend of sudden and uncalled for issues.

It's like a hammer drops on you without you seeing it. I wish they were smaller issues, no, they're always major. Most of the time I'd just reinstall, and I hate that. It's so much work for me.

I set things the way I like them and then they're ruined, and the hunt begins. I have been wanting to switch for a long time, and I honestly have even been looking into some of those immutable distros (that's how much I don't want to be fixing my system.

I'm tired, I just want to use my system to get work done). I was also told that Nobara is really good (is it? Never tried it). My only hold back — and it's probably silly to some of you— is the AUR. I love it.

It's the most convenient thing ever, and possibly the main reason why I have stuck with Arch and its kids. Everything is there.

So, what do y'all recommend? I was once told by some kind soul to use an immutable distro and setup "distrobox" on it if I wanted the AUR.

I've never tried this "distrobox" thing (I can research it, no problem). I also game here and there and would like to squeeze as much performance as I can out of my PC (all AMD, BTW, and I only play single player games).

So, I don't know what to do. I need y'all's suggestions, please. I'll aggregate all of the suggestions and go through them and (hopefully) come up with something good for my sanity. Please suggest anything you think fits my situation. I don't care, I will 100% appreciate every single suggestion and look into it.

I'm planning to take it slow on the switch, and do a lot of research before switching. Unless my system shits the bed more than now then I don't know. I currently can't upgrade my system, as I wouldn't be able to log in after the update. It just fails to log in.

I had to restore a 10 days old snapshot to be able to get back into my damn desktop. I have already copied my whole home directory into another drive I have on my PC, so if shit hits the fan, I'll at least have my data. Help a tired brother out, please <3. Thank you so much in advance.

128 comments

tldr; look into fedora silverblue maybe ?

I came here just for advertising Linux Mint once again. 👍

One of ublue's offerings are probably best. Immutability is great for resiliency and updates are easily rolled back if something were to go wrong. Bazzite is great for gaming, otherwise checkout Aurora and Bluefin.

Been using Linux almost 30 years, went from Redhat to everything else, and now I'm back on Redhat to stay. Fedora KDE for a nice, boring, up to date, and bulletproof OS.

You want bazzite, for this usecase, disregard anyone who suggests something that isn't immutable, all of the immutable suggestions are valid, but if it's not immutable, it is huge downgrade for this usecase.

Another Debian suggestion here, including for gaming and even VR. It basically just works.

Debian stable. It's been here for 30 years, it's the largest community OS, it'll likely be here in 30 years (or until we destroy ourselves). Any derivative is subject to higher probability of additional issues, stoppage of development in the long run, etc.
If you're extra lazy, Ubuntu LTS with Ubuntu Pro (free) enabled. You could use that for 10 years (or until Canonical cancels it) before you need to upgrade. Ubuntu is the least risky alternative for boring operation since it's used in the enterprise and Canonical is profitable. The risk there is Canonical doing an IPO and Ubuntu going the way of tightening access like Red Hat did.
- I’ll second Debian. I run it on backports and it’s reasonably stable, but if you want it rock-solid, don’t do that.
  You might want to keep your browser more up to date than the rest of your OS. That’s up to you as the user. Mozilla has a deb you can add to Apt manually, should you choose.
- I'm in complete agreement with this post. Debian is pretty meticulous with their releases and Ubuntu LTS has a predictable release cadence if that's more important than "when it's ready"
- Ubuntu? Never. I have had longer less problem free with Arch than Ubuntu. Last time I tried it for a project it was broken on install.
  I am all for Debian, love it. But Ubuntu has been crappy since day one.
  
  Interesting. We use it for work since 2016 (high hundreds of workstations) and I've used it since 2005 on variety of machines and use cases without significant issues. We've also used it to operate a couple of datacenters (OpenStack private clouds) with good results. That said I've been using LTS exclusively since 2014 and don't use PPAs since 2018-20 and it's been solid. My main machine hasn't been reinstalled since the initial install in 2014.
- apt broke my entire computer, so no

Use distrobox brother, it is really underrated, I use it on my fedora PC so I can have access to the AUR all the time, you could even use Debian with it and have access the the AUR on a 2 year out of date install, seriously, it is really worth the effort of checking out, changed my Linux experience forever.
- I tried it and I was very confused. I was trying to build an app from source and it was complete cluster fuck. I gave up

I would say fedora silverblue. Have been using it for a while. All updates, app and os, are distributed via app center so reasonably foolproof.
And a benefit is that it has podman out of the box so you can run docker images without fiddling with the terminal.

I put Fedora on a laptop as a whim almost 2 years ago.
My main computers are arch, but. I had an iso handy and hadn't used anything from based in years.
I am surprised at how quickly it gets updates. Gimp was at 3 before arch stable.
Anyways, I just keep updating the laptop and it just keeps working. I have yet to actually do anything for maintenance on it.

If you can wait a bit for the Rocky 10 release, you'd get a decade of boring rock-solid secure computing.

A few paragraphs would do wonders for the legibility of your post.

You could try CachyOS, arch based and you can run it with KDE. I use Pop!OS and have been super happy with it

NIXOS, set and forget. It will not change unless you ask it to. Occasionally things might get renamed, but they set up warnings and don’t deprecate old naming for a long time
- NIXOS has been really great so far for me. very stable and mostly easy to figure out. my only problem has been getting SSBM netplay working.
- This is the way

Pls format your posts it's so much easier to read
- Says the comment without punctuation ;-)

Debian. I've had installations which went trough several major version upgrades, I've worked with 'set and forget' setups where someone originally installed Debian and I get my hands on it 3-5 years later to upgrade it and it just works. Sure, it might not be as fancy as some alternatives and some things may need manual tweaking here and there, but the thing just works and even on rare occasion something breaks you'll still have options to fix it assuming you're comfortable with plain old terminal.
- I was actually thinking of that. How's testing and unstable, are they good, too?
  
  They are the opposite of "set it and forget it".
  Probably the most maintenance-heavy distros out there.
  They're like Arch, if the Arch maintainers didn't care about keeping the system working.
  
  They are excactly what the name implies. Testing is generally pretty good, but it's still testing. And unstable is also what the name implies. People, myself included back in the day, run both as daily drivers, but if you want rock stable distribution installing unstable revision might not be the best choise.
- I can't speak for the desktop side, but for my server it's been running without interruption for years. About once per week I do something stupid and use all available memory, but it hasn't crashed once. It just runs a bit slow until I free up some RAM, then Docker comes back to life once I free up some disk space. I definitely recommend it for anyone who wants a server OS that just works.

Basically every distro is based on either arch or debian (some exceptions). I've been perfectly happy with debian, even as a gamer.
- Debian stable? You don't have issues since it has older packages? All of your hardware works just fine?
  
  If you want stability, Debian Stable is the way to go (Servers, mission critical tasks). Even Debian Sid works great on my Legion Go.
  I recommend Testing or Sid for desktops.
  
  Stable yea. My PC is a bit older (7 years) and I've never had any issues with hardware, even with my nvidia card.

Bazzite, I use it as my daily driver, distro box allows using the aur easily, it is really simple to use.

ubuntu LTS is like this for me, but i can't recommend snaps. use it if you plan on uninstalling it and using flatpaks instead. i had a brief stint with mint and fedora and they seem good too.
in general, regardless of distro, i wait for the .1 releases after a big update, doing this has saved my ass before.
- Snaps, flatpck and app images, everything works ok usually on Ubuntu (if you have plenty of drive to store them all)

Ive been a long term windows user. Almost 80% of my life. Tried macos and linux but always went to windows. Last year, i decided to move away from big tech in general. Ive moved away from most of it except windows, which is windows 10 LTSC. I tried ubuntu, kubuntu, fedora gnome, fedora kde, kde neon, arch (failed hard), arctix, endeavour and lastly i settled with linux mint cinnamon. A couple of tweak and a few hours. It feels like home. Goodbye windows, you will not be missed. I do dualboot windows 10 whenever i need to use program that only support windows.
- I'm now debating between mint and kalpa suse. I went KDE and mint doesn't have it
  
  You can install KDE on Mint.

I recommend void. It's rock solid, "stable rolling release", no systemd, amazing package manager. The installation is a bit more "advanced", but I guess coming from Arch that should not be a problem for you.

I've been wanting to try out NixOS for this very reason lately (although I don't break my system often). If everything works for me there, I'll switch to it.
- I've thought about nix, but it looks like it has a somewhat steep learning curve, and I honestly don't even have the time for that :/
  
  For run of the mill sys admin stuff, you don't need to dive too deep. Even my reasonably complex needs of containers and mixed workstations is, imo pretty parsable from an intuitive perspective. I was reluctant at first but once I saw how a general sys admin would use it, it made my life so much easier.
  Highly recommended.
- Yep, this is the answer. Set it, forget it, accidentally have your hard drive destroyed irrecoverably, and re-set everything up to the exact working state you were used to in under 15min.
  It's a fair bit of initial setup and learning, but afterwards, the word "stable" takes on a new meaning.

distrobox will give you access to the AUR and should be installable on any distro but the immutable/atomic approach might be worth looking into. I've been running bazzite on my personal machine and bluefin on my work machine for about a year now and it's been great. the only snag is learning the order of operations for installing things without a reboot.
I am just one data point but both distros have been rock solid for me and half the time I don't even realize updates had been run unless I see a new feature or something like that.
good luck on your journey!
- Thank you. I'm in the process of looking into Aurora DX. I've read their documentations and it seems to almost have everything I need. Illegal dig more into it and see. I currently am unable to access my PC. It never logs in. Lmao.
  Edit: forgot to ask, is installing osprober a straightforward process on these immutable distros? I dualboot with windows
  
  i am unfamiliar with osprober but if you're installing it from the AUR, it should be as easy as creating a distrobox container with arch as its base and running the installation command(s) from there, then a single line to export the command to your base system if you want to use it outside of that container.

Set it and forget it, eh?
Any distro you like, as long as you stop futzing with it.
Seriously... they're breaking because you change things. Linux machines stay up for years without issue. Stop breaking the install.
- I don't really change many things on my system, but this is just a trend with endeavour os

I've been distro hopping for years. After each time trying a few distros, I always find myself coming back to Linux Mint (cinnamon desktop environment). It has everything I need, and just works beautifully out of the box. It might not be flashy or have the latest cutting edge features, but it's stable.
I'm currently running the Debian edition of Mint (LMDE), and wishing I was back on standard Mint. Nothing major, but a few minor persistent issues that never happened on Mint.
I did try NixOS (immutable OS), but it didn't seem to have support for all the apps I wanted. I gave up fairly quickly, so you'll probably have more success.
- I was thinking of switching from Mint to LMDE because why not go straight to the source right? Can you share what minor issues you’ve had with LMDE?
  
  I think I have graphics driver issues, but it could just as easily be a failing graphics card without testing. Mint has a great driver manager from Ubuntu, but LMDE didn't seem to have any driver GUI.
  The main symptom is about 30 minutes into almost any game the fps drops from 60+ to ~10. Only restarting the game seems to fix it.
  I don't remember the other minor issues, so they've either been fixed, or so minor I stopped noticing them.
  I think LMDE is good enough to use as a daily driver. The installer is quite nice too.
- I want to use mint, but they don't have plasma. I know I can install it, but I'm not sure about the support and updates and all that.
  
  Installing Plasma should be as simple as "apt install kde-plasma-desktop", then log out and select plasma from the login screen. I've tried other DEs but not Plasma, so I can't say for certain it will work.
  You can always try distros in a VM almost completely risk free. It won't tell you everything, but it's an easy way to get first impressions without losing your main OS.
  Edit: This forum thread says you can install and use Plasma, but it's not a great experience. Mint will probably not be the right option for you then.

Fedora Workstation has been really good in my experience. The available software is shockingly up to date and I haven't run into much breakage of any kind in the year or so I've been using it across 2 systems (despite my best efforts every few months when the urge to tinker hits me). I do occasionally run into issues caused by the default SELinux policies, but they're not especially difficult to work around if you're comfortable using the terminal.
I do share your sentiment about the AUR - I definitely miss it at times. That said, Flatpaks and the fact that pre-built RPMs are so commonplace have both softened the blow a lot.
- Came from Arch and OpenSuse. Fedora has been such a great switch. As I’ve gotten older and became a dad, my computer time at home is limited and I don’t have endless evenings to troubleshoot shit. Fedora has been stable for me for the last 4 years. I use the KDE spin.
- Thank you. I've run Fedora for a long while, too. Albeit, it was a while ago (not sure how good it is now), but I've never had any luck with its kde version. It was always broken (for me at least). Also, hunting for apps was kind of a big issue. Then come copr repos. But I guess we have a good case with flatpaks now. Even thought I couldn't use them before due to storage constraints, but now, that's not an issue. So, I'll keep Fedora in mind. I appreciate you
  
  It's currently the most simple to use and "just works" option.

First to answer your main question if I were you I would try NixOS, because it's declarative so it's essentially impossible to break, i.e. if it breaks for whatever reason a fresh reinstall will get you back to exactly where you were.
That being said, I know it's anecdotal but I have been using Arch for (holy crap) 15 years, and I've never experienced an update breaking my system. I find that most of the time people complain about Arch breaking with an update they're either not using Arch (but Manjaro, Endeavor, etc) and rely heavily on AUR which one should specifically not do, much less on Arch derivatives. The AUR is great, but there's a reason those packages are not on the main repos, don't use any system critical stuff from them and you should be golden. Also try to figure out why stuff broke when it did, you'll learn a lot about what you're doing wrong on your setup because most people would have just updated without any issues. Otherwise it really doesn't matter which distro you choose, mangling a distro with manual installations to the point where an upgrade breaks them can be done on most of them, and going for a fully immutable one will be very annoying if you're so interested in poking at the system.
- I would try NixOS, because it's declarative so it's essentially impossible to break
  I have been using Arch for (holy crap) 15 years, and I've never experienced an update breaking my system
  And for this reason I would naysay the people recommending Nixos. I used to use Arch, and had few major problems, but lots of times that required me to engage my brain - and not always when I wanted to. One of the reasons I left was wanting something I wouldn't have to suddenly deal with, or always keep an eye on the Arch news.
  (The main reason I moved though was at that time no internet connection in the house for all those constant updates! And an Ubuntu repository in country for when I did have a slow net connection. Else I might have just stayed with Arch.)
  Nix's declarative model is great in principle, but there's always things to go wrong in computers. If nothing else, you should always have your browser up to date for security, and up to date means updates - changes. Because Nix is aimed at technical folks, it's likely to have many hiccups that "just need a bit more learning curve then it'll be stable" - and that only occur for some people.
  Even Mint has things that go wrong, that I can easily fix but worry me when I recommend it to Windows friends. (And I see you're after Plasma so Mint maybe not the best.)
- I agree with this, the issue may be the packages installed rather than the distro. For a more reliable experience, I like to:
  Use Flatpak instead of the AUR where possible
  Use built-in filesystems and avoid DKMS
  
  No, I've been running Endeavour forever and know his pain quite well. It's almost always core packages that break it. None of the stuff from the AUR has ever caused issues. That being said he should be using btrfs and taking regular snapshots. Sometimes I feel like installing grub just to make recovering snapshots easier.
  Twice this year I've had updates break the system, both were core packages. I just restore a snapshot then delay my next update for a couple days and it's usually fixed.

Wow, what a wall of text. I'm sorry but I'm sure I skimmed some parts.
Look. The bulk of the replies you're going to get will be like "this is my favourite distro and here's how it works for you" not "this is the best distro for your criteria." It's important to understand the deep level of bias you're going to get.
But your cause is a noble one. I use a particular style of distro because it can be trusted to install well, back out well, do both safely, and allow validation at every stage. I think it's a good candidate, and it's already been mentioned as a really great 'set it and forget it' distro.
Good luck.
- And what distro might that be?

use fedora. linus torvals uses it

Look. I've been there. I started my Linux journey with Arch based distros, then distrohopped a lot, and finally found the best for me, and what I personally consider the best either for normal users or those that don't want to do any maintenance.
It's the Universal Blue family of distros: Bazzite (gaming / KDE / gnome) Aurora (standard / development / KDE) Bluefin (standard / development / gnome)
Set it and forget about it. It just freaking works. For GUI apps install from the Discover app store (which uses Flatpak), for cli apps use Homebrew (brew install whatever). If you can't find something, open Distrobox (already included) create an Arch container, install whatever you want from the AUR, and use it like you're used to. It works like freaking magic.
If somehow you manage to brick your installation, when you reboot you'll be able to boot to a past snapshot.
You just can't fail with this. It's the best of the best IMHO.
- You absolutely can fail. I daily drive bazzite but many things have been pretty rough:
  Any coding apps that will use an external device -> you can't use flatpak. You have to use distrobox that constantly freezes your entire mouse for 3-5 seconds upon any sort of dialog, settings, saving, anything where it has to access the filesystem. Then you have to add udev rules to directories that in the documentation says not to write to, and reloading the rules doesn't work for testing, you have to fully restart with every minor change or it will seem like the change didn't work.
  Luckily most device drivers seem to work in the provided arch distrobox but holy dependency hell. Things will fail to install because they need a package that exists on the host but not the container so you get an unsolvable "file exists" conflict. When installing a package, it will sometimes just try to grab an old version of a dependency specifically that will 404 out instead of just grabbing the most recent version (never happened on arch itself to me)
  Setting up a plasma vault with gocryptfs was not fun figuring out how. Also ran into tons of dependency problems and the fact that fedora just abandoned it specifically. Ended up just having to stick the binary in a random folder and point to it.
  Any sort of document authentication/signing -> doesn't work and will not work in the future for a long time.
  You absolutely have to install rpms still for corectrl, any external devices, like drawing tablets, etc...
  Some games inexplicably use <50% GPU and <40% CPU with terrible framerates and will not go any higher (or lower) no matter what, switching between low and high settings and resolution results in 0fps change.
  When I have my config set and don't have to change anything, it is super super nice to never have to manually update, but anything outside of very basic usage is weaving through nonstandard undocumented territory.
  Bazzite trades maintenance headaches for configuration and installation headaches. For me, that is worth it.
  
  I'm sorry Bazzite didn't work out for you.
  Your use case sounds like a better fit for Arch, since you have very specific needs like adding uncommon device drivers, gocryptfs, udev rules, etc. For anyone else, wanting to try Bazzite, I'll answer the rest of the topics:
  Flatpak apps with external devices
  All apps I've tried support external devices just fine, in the event the app you need doesn't support external devices out of the box, try adding USB device access through the app's permissions in the System Settings app.
  Distrobox Freezes & dependencies
  I have an all AMD desktop PC, and an intel laptop, Distrobox runs perfectly fine. Every package will rely on dependencies inside Distrobox.
  Edit: after writing this post, I realized I needed someway to de-drm my Audible books, so I installed the Libation RPM in my Fedora Distrobox, it failed to launch because it needed libicu or something like that, so I opened the Fedora Distrobox terminal and typed sudo dnf install libicu, done. Launched perfectly like it was installed on my base Bazzite installation. But all the dependencies remain isolated, unable to crap all over my system if something happens. My system remains shielded from dependency apocalypse.
  Encryption
  Bazzite supports LUKS full disk encryption.
  corectrl
  Use LACT, you can install it through the Bazzite Portal (that's Bazzite 1st run app, you can run it anytime though)
  RPMs are needed for any external devices, like drawing tablets, etc..
  Any external devices would be a great overstatement. I have the standard PC Peripherals, then I have: xbox 360 controllers, xbox series X controllers, Thrustmaster Wheel, Logitech x56 Flight Stick, none of them require any RPM and just work out of the box, unlike on Windows. For drawing tablets, there are tons that are supported right out of the box without any additional driver, for example Wacom.
  For any developers out there wanting to customize Bazzite to fit your particular use case, you can even easily fork the distro and build your own and still get auto-updates, with any additional device drivers, RPMs, and whatever else you want to fulfill your edge use case. Follow this link here.

Mint. It's not sexy. But it always just works. Never had an update break anything. I've got an Nvidia card, which ppl said was notorious for not working with Linux, it just works. The installer just reached out and grabbed the appropriate drivers, so easy. Have yet to have a steam game not work.
10/10 would recommend for anyone.
- Can plasma work no problem on it? I can't do any other DE but that one
  
  Ppl are saying it's possible but prone to cause problems

I stopped using Arch a long time ago for this same reason. Either Fedora (or derivatives like Nobara) or an atomic/immutable distro (like Bazzite, Silverblue, Kinoite) is probably the way to go.
I used to feel like Ubuntu was a good option for this, but it no longer is: too often they try to push undesirable changes that need manual tweaking to fix after release upgrades. Debian Stable is generally good for low-maintenance use but doesn't keep up as well with newer hardware or newer updates to video drivers and mesa, which makes it suboptimal for typical gaming use. Debian Testing can be prone to break things in updates (in my experience, worse than Arch does).
I saw another comment recommend Rocky/RHEL, but note that their kernel doesn't support btrfs. Since you mentioned a root snapshot, I expect you probably use it.

Bazzite
- I use Bluefin myself, and it’s honestly been game changing. Using an immutable distro has been the greatest quality of life upgrade in my 15 years of using Linux.
  Also, if you use distrobox (automatically installed with Bluefin, Aurora, Bazzite, etc.) you can even setup an Arch container and continue to use the AUR. I use Steam installed from within an Arch container and it doesn’t feel any different from a natively installed app. It also means I don’t have to use the Steam flatpak which I had a couple issues with.
- OP, another vote for this one.
  It addresses your concerns in a wonderful way:
  Reliability; While it's far from unique in this regard, I'd argue that the uBlue distros are one of if not the most reliable desktop Linux experience that's currently out there. You know most of the drill already (read: built-in rollback functionality, clean base system). But, the uBlue project has some aces up on their sleeves that (to my knowledge) are pretty unique:
  "Ninety (90) days of image archives allowing for flexible rollback options." The images are stored online, so they don't even take space on your device.
  Shared community maintenance, i.e. even if upstream has a rare fuck-up, you can trust on uBlue's maintainers to deal with it without you even noticing. For a recent example of this, we got this.
  Access to the AUR; while Distrobox can be installed on any distro, uBlue projects come with perks that make the whole experience better than it's found elsewhere. From quadlets that have been properly setup from the get-go so that you don't have to (additionally) maintain those distrobox containers, to even minor things like including Boxbuddy OOTB to make the transition as easy as they come.
  Setup for Gaming; It goes without saying that Bazzite is excellent for gaming. It's gaming-ready OOTB and includes (almost^[1]) all the performance tweaks you'd wish.
  Setup and forget; I (almost^[2]) don't know any other distro that better embodies this than Bazzite (and its other uBlue-relatives).
  All in all, I think Bazzite is definitely worth a look. Consider installing it and setup to your heart's content. If -at any time during or after that process- you come across an insurmountable^[3] issue caused by its atomic/cloud-native/'immutable' nature, then you can check it off your list and look elsewhere.
  CachyOS is still superior in this regard by doing a better job at inching out (literally) every performance gain out there.
  Perhaps Endless OS does an even better job at this, but that would be a bad recommendation for all the other reasons.
  Before giving up, if you wouldn't have done it by then, at least consider contacting the community through their Discord server. They're very helpful. FWIW, Bazzite has pretty excellent documentation as well. (Even if it ain't as exhaustive as the even more impressive ArchWiki. Granted, it doesn't have to be as expansive.)
- Seconded, I moved my gaming rig is on Bazzite and has been trouble free and maintenance free ever since.
  I installed Bluefin on the laptop I gave my father, and it's been happily running trouble-free every single day since August without a single intervention. And my father is the kind of man who can conjure up unknown bugs, weird failures and random crashes by simple hand contact.
- Literally said they don't want immutable.
  
  You are confidentially incorrect. I suggest you actually take the time to read the post again.
  I honestly have even been looking into some of those immutable distros (that's how much I don't want to be fixing my system.
  
  Literally said they don’t want immutable.
  At best, they might have implied it. (But I don't think they do.) Here are the (relevant) snippets:
  I honestly have even been looking into some of those immutable distros (that’s how much I don’t want to be fixing my system. I’m tired, I just want to use my system to get work done)
  I was once told by some kind soul to use an immutable distro and setup “distrobox” on it if I wanted the AUR.

Look, this is the reason people pay RedHat money. Go install Rocky Linux, turn on all the automatic updates and ignore it for the next five years.
On the enthusiast side, NixOS seems to be working fine if you want newer versions of software or larger repos.
- NixOS is great if you’re ready to learn Nix, which is an undertaking
  
  I guess we can formulate a law:
  Stable
  Easy to use
  Up-to-date
  Pick any two.

Linux Mint. As an alternative: any kind of BSD is going to be pretty stable.

i'm trying out Aeon at the moment. it's from the opensuse people.
it auto-updates, it snapshots itself so any failed update will just silently revert, and it does flatpaks or distrobox only.
if you're okay with gnome, try it.
- https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Kalpa for KDE
- I've read the whole documentation page. It sounds really good, but still has some issues that I might not like. I'm going to install it in a vm and see. Also, kalpa is still in alpha stage and I'm not a gnome person.

I came from Arch to Fedora as well but using Universal Blue's images. In my case, Aurora (KDE), and daughter's Bluefin (Gnome). They update in the background and only install when you reboot. So far, most of the newer software releases such as web browsers or the desktop environment fall within a day or two for being installed which is a nice alternative. The big plus I see on these too is they are immutable so if something installs or breaks, you just boot into the previous version from Grub and go from there.
Additionally, OpenSuse MicroOS has options for whatever environment you are used to such as Gnome or KDE, this is immutable as well. I view all of these as "Set and Forget".
- I didnt even remember which os I had until I read this and remembered it was aurora
  
  Wtf 😂
- Do external devices work? Like Xbox controller, printers and stuff like that?
  
  Yes. I have a network server for my printer and works. Also a label printer hooked up via USB. Also USB SSD and other drives. You should not see any problems.

I used Fedora, and am now leaving for the exact reason you're leaving Arch (plus IMO bad repos). Switched to openSUSE Tumbleweed a few months ago and am having a much better experience than with Fedora :D; I use the PC for programming, audio recording and mixing, document stuff, etc. (No gaming though).
Nobara is good but does break regularly, FYI... If you're a "power-user" I wouldn't recommend it as a daily driver.
There's also Void Linux, which hasn't ever broken on me due to an update, but is still a lot of work, due to its nature. It's actually quite stable though, and you might enjoy it, since it's quite similar to Arch and has very large repos.
I can't say much about immutable distros, as the only one I've used is bazzite, which was kinda horrible (broke constantly).
Well, I hope that helped. Good luck!

My favorite distros are Gentoo and Debian.
I can say with confidence that Linux Mint is what you're looking for.

OpenSuse Leap or even Tumbleweed. After getting the media codecs up and running, and remembering to set you firewall zone to "home", you're pretty golden.
- Opensuse is absolutely not a set it and forget it distro. I get recommending your favorite distro to other users, but telling them it's an easy to use distro is absolutely false and sets them up for disappointment. You have to download the codecs yourself if you want to do so much as watch a video on firefox, for which you have to add a new repo. I've tried it for two days and I've already spent half of them fixing bugs or snapping back to a version that worked because it froze after sleeping before I even did anything with it other than log in.
  
  I'm sorry you had a bad experience. I've used it as my daily driver with minimal effort post installation on multiple occasions, usually on work laptops where time spent tinkering is time wasted. I've found it to be a good choice in that context. I now own my own business, and OpenSuse has allowed me to repurpose older laptops as workstations for my employees with minimal effort.
  The only actual pain point I've seen is setting up a wifi enabled printer ... required that I change my firewall zone so the printer could be discovered. And that only required a few minutes to figure out. The fact that the firewall is set to a more secure default is probably a feature, not a bug.
  
  I can't speak for you but I didn't have to do any of that, my installs worked out of the box...
  
  ... that is def not my case, openSUSE is saving me a lot of time.
  I've switched all my fiends & family (desktops) to Tumbleweed like 5 years ago bcs I don't have to do any maintenance ever (not even customisation at the beginning, beyond setting them accounts). It has always been stable with exception that they only became "almost" out-of-the-box gaming friendly only in recent year or two.
  Tumbleweed is just there, always updated, and feels nice. Oh, it's not the quickest boot maybe?
  Previously (15+ years, maybe 20 my parents) I had my family on Debians/Ubuntus which were stable but always very fiddly to distro upgrade, I don't even remember what went wrong with old Fedora, but I changed it back in less than a year (almost 10 years ago, not relevant).

Could some of the instability issues you have on arch could come from what you are installing from AUR?
I use AUR for a few things and it is a great resource but the packages are maintained by users and can cause issues.
I update those packages carefully, remove them if I am no longer using them and reconsider which ones i actually need installed in the first place.
While doing this I have only had a handful of issues pop up while updating and usually there is a recent thread describing the issue and how to fix it after a quick search.
- I can count the apps I install from the AUR on fingers, and none of them are independencies or high level drivers. Just regular apps. The issue wasn't the AUR, it's always something with KDE that gets fucked

I've been using Linux for more than a decade and distro hopped quite a bit. Mint used to be my happy place, but recently within the last 5 years or so I've been on Arch derivatives. Endeavour was never stable enough for my liking, but Manjaro has been great. I did have to go back to a snapshot once, fairly recently, but that was primary because I fecked it up and not due to an update.
You mentioned that you have tried several Arch-based distros, so I'm not sure if this includes Manjaro.
- I have tried manjaro, but I didn't like how slow it was and how slow its release cycle was, too.

OpenSUSE Leap is the way to go my dude. It's been formulated by pedantic Germans and you can't go wrong with YAST/zypper for package management.

I never wanted a hobby, but rather an operating system. I've been using Pop! for over six years. I only had one stretch where I felt like I was chasing annoying bugs and I don't remember it clearly enough to remember how long it lasted.
- I never wanted a hobby, but rather an operating system.
  That's exactly how I'm starting to feel. I was a "distro-hopper" when I was new to it, but now I just want shit to work. The only thing stopping me from pop is the state of their distro at current time. It feels like it's been abondened or something. I know they're busy with cosmic, but that's what it looks like. Also, I'm a kde plasma only person. I just can't use anything else.
  
  Not constantly changing things until there is something significant to release is a path to the stability that I value. Meantime, packages run and the system works.

Fedora. Ubuntu lost the crown.
If you want AUR specifically then you can only use Arch. That's the Arch package manager, and every distro has its own. Fedora has DNF, Debian/Ubuntu has apt...etc
- AUR isn't the Arch package manager. It's a user-contributed package definition repo.

Try blendOS. It's basically Arch but immutable. And SteamOS also exists.
- It has been some time since I gave this a proper look. Do you use this yourself? If so, would you be so kind to share some of your experiences?
  
  I used Silverblue and tried HoloISO, but it's the same thing.

Garuda is about the same.
Arch base, preconfigured for btrfs snapshots on Pacman updates (and they provide a handy garuda-update wrapper to that), many niceties already done for you.
I've used the snapshot feature a couple times and only because the Nvidia drivers botched something horribly and I went back to the same snapshot a couple times.
And I use distrobox (rootless podman FTW) for some crap too. Like that time I needed WebEx at a moment's notice for a call (and they only provide a deb and rpm). Or spur of the moment dev environments when I don't wanna futz around with vscode devcontainers.
But with arch-based stuff, you gotta read the Pacman output. If you don't wanna, definitely reconsider immutable. Next time I can be bothered to reinstall, that's where I'm headed. Heck, you can start a distrobox with Arch and install all the AUR shit you please without a major worry.
- Their ISOs are broken and don't boot. Tried every single one, changed USB flash drives, nope none of them booted. Used the same drive for another distro and it booted just fine
  
  Well that's not good...
  They seem to be reasonably active, so I would imagine that situation won't last long.

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