i use cachyos, runs swimmingly for me. I’m not sure arch is good for your usecase tho.

Mediacenter/homeserver? I’d personally choose something like fedora, but debian sounds fine too

EndeavourOS. It’s like Arch, but a bit easier with a few automation and gui stuff builtin. It’s still heavy on terminal usage and it comes light out of the box. I switched from Manjaro to EndeavourOS, because Manjaro gave me some problems (especially their package manager and because of the AUR too, and I didn’t like the maintainers, no further comment). It’s my daily driver for years now. I use it for everything, daily usage, little programming, gaming on Steam and especially RetroArch too. I’m a huge RetroArch fan. :-) So if you plan to use base Archlinux or Manjaro, then I can recommend to use EndeavourOS a lot.

Cachy OS is probably a good choice too, because their focus on performance optimizations. But they do also have a bit more, let’s say bloat, out of the box and their branding is a bit strong it seems. It’s a bit farther away from base Archlinux than EndeavourOS is.

I used to experiment around with various distros some years past until I got into Arch. Haven’t distro hopped once since, I’ve completely erased Windows from my life and I’m gaming exactly as I would if I was on Windows. I never have trouble finding a package since almost everything exists either in the official repositories or in the AUR, and I get the latest versions with all the new features and fixes. Rarely some things do break because of the rolling releases, but it’s almost always just a matter of a single google search to fix. For me it’s worth it for having all the latest versions of everything.

My opinion would be different for a server or a work laptop where stability is much more important. For servers I would pick Debian for sure, for work laptop I’d consider Fedora probably

I use plain Arch for desktop, but for servers I use headless debian. A media center is sort of in between, so up to you. In terms of resource usage on an older laptop, I expect the choice of DE would matter more.

I use Arch btw. The best Arch distro is just normal Arch linux. If you really want stuff from other “Arch distros”, you can add their repos or customize your configs. There’s nothing you can do in an Arch distro you can’t do with Arch itself.

Not since the 2022 GRUB incident. Now use Tumbleweed.

If you’re going to use Arch you should use Arch. One of the biggest advantages for Arch is the AUR which can cause many issues on Arch based distros that are not Arch.

That being said, for a media center, if you’re not used to, I wouldn’t go with Arch, Debian is a much better choice since you’re already used to it and should be good for that use case.

Don’t use Manjaro it’s a wildly unstable piece of shit

I’ve had great success with Garuda Linux. I’m running the KDE “Mokka” version.

It’s quite opinionated, so be aware of that, but it’s been very reliable on my HP laptop (it even has hibernation support!) and the built-in apps are top notch.

Just be aware that Arch-based distros tend to shun things like Flatpaks in favor of their own repositories and the Arch User Repository (AUR), and there aren’t any friendly point and click app stores like KDE Discover or GNOME Software. You will have to install apps using the command line or tools like Octopi, which is great if you know exactly what you’re looking for, but terrible for app discovery.

Since I mostly use Flatpaks, I installed Bazaar. You can install Discover, but it only works for Flatpak.

I used to run Manjaro, but after it left two of my computers in an unbootable state after an upgrade a few years ago, I moved on.

Cachyos has a meta gaming package which will install steam, Lutris and a couple of launchers like heroic games launcher. Should have some extra optimisations as well. Lutris can install emulators too, as well as showing games in your steam library. I’m not sure if it can go full screen like retroarch and use a controller to select games, maybe it can.

💀 Manjarno

But I’ve been wanting to tell people that I use Arch.

Biblically accurate arch user

artix, and honorific mentions to parabola and hyperbola (hyperbola is moving towards becoming a gnu + kopenbsd thing, like there was an attempt for a debian gnu + kfreebsd effort though this one got dropped)

EndeavorOS is my go to for arch based systems. But with the archinstall script I’d say just give vanilla a go