I’ve been using Debian (and formerly Ubuntu) for many years.
But I’ve been wanting to tell people that I use Arch.
I’ve been considering the following distros:
- Arch
- Cachy
- Manjaro
- Any others?
I’m leaning towards Arch or Cachy. This is for a mediocre laptop that I’m planning to use as a media center: Kodi, Retroarch, Steam, etc. Should I even be using Arch for this? Maybe Debian is more stable…
Sorry if this has been asked before. Thanks for any tips!


Arch in the front, Debian in the back(end). I run Arch on my laptop and Debian on my homeserver. I’ve ran Debian on laptops before and if stable is getting older hardware support can be a struggle, much better on a rolling distro like Arch. And having all the newest toys on your desktop is very very nice. While on my homeserver I mostly want stability, everything else runs in (podman) containers anyway.
Cachy is a distro I would consider, because it’ll theoretically give you slightly better battery life due to the optimised compiles, although I’m not sure you’ll ever really notice. Manjaro has a reputation of breaking far more often than Arch does, so that one’s a no for me.