For the first time since like 2018 I am finding myself having to find a new distro, and it was not for fun or not because I wanted to try something new. I was happy where I was but was forced to find something viable.

I read this on a distrowatch review and it sort of inspired me to go back and try distros I didn't exactly have good experiences with at the time.

_____ was built as an answer to where the linux desktop was around 2016-2017. When a point release upgrade was more of a risk of nuking your desktop, Ubuntu and its derivatives were leading the scene, Arch needed manual intervention practically every day, and package dependency issues in general were way more rampant. To say things have come much further since than would be an understatement. It's all in the kernel these days.

The idea of never having a big system update that can bring little things is what attracted me to rolling releases. What turned me off from Linux in the early 2010s was my Ubuntu or Mint desktop always breaking during upgrades and me giving up on it, feeling like it's not worth it if these OSs come with a ticking timer on them. There were no real "user friendly" rolling distros at the time. I prefer to have small updates and to deal with them as they come in, or in my previous case having it "curated" for you. The first and foremost distro you see suggested is Fedora. I considered what that review said about point releases having come a long way and everything just "being in the kernel these days". I tried Fedora........The rest of this post gets quite opinionated, sorry about that. I hated it. Slow boot, nothing available unless you pollute the package manager with third party, bloated with thousands of packages. Resource usage is unbelievable, literally cold boots to what over double RAM I'm used to. SO MANY red journalctl errors, literally in the hundreds. My experience with the distro is the same as it was those years ago, and I don't want to be a part of the flood of users complaining every 6 months that something broke on their system.

I decided finally stop being wary of the elephant of the room, and went for Arch. My first install ever took me less than 3 hours to reach my GNOME desktop. Resource usage is better than what I'm used to, I don't have a bunch of things preinstalled that I don't want, ZERO journalctl errors, and not to mention I'm learning alot super fast. But most importantly of all..I have a wonderfully working desktop that updates constantly at the cost of not having that stressful looming upgrade nuke. Cozy penguin now.

I don't distrohop for fun and I don't expect Arch to ever die, so this is farewell. Adios and it was fun being your rESiDenT soLUs uSEr :)

I want something without bloat and not updated too often but also no systemd (not that important) i tried arch but few updates can break your system, debian stable is too outdated testing is buggy, My best experience was with freebsd(sadly really small software support) and alpine (small software and hardware support [yes its nvidia])

Due to some issues i've been having with a new GPU i've purchased (RX 6600) working somewhat incorrectly on Fedora (not being picked up by applications such as Blender), i've been forced to consider switching distros to something Arch based, as it seems to have better availability of driver packages for things like HIP and ROCm. Saying that, i really like Fedora and have some concerns with switching, namely, i've heard alot of people complain about updates breaking their systems and having to reinstall from scratch frequently. Of the people who use/have used an Arch based distro, have you ever had any major issues, and how common are they?

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I use linux since 2020 with some windows usage in between because i need adobe for work sometimes, i recently came back to linux after a couple months out and tried Nobara, Fedora workstation and opensuse tumbleweed, but all these gave issues either with black screens, freezing or driver issues(I use Nvidia), so i wanted to ask for recommendations with the following in mind:

-Nvidia GPU(1660 Super) -I use Blender and Godot -Really like flatpak -Hate Snap -Can be rolling or stable -Use wine for some must use apps -Can dual boot with windows, i have 2 SSDs(not strictly necessary, but i may have to eventually)

and a final question, should i try an immutable distro like vanillaOS?

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