(Manjaro keeps breaking itself for a laugth)

Are you perhaps using the AUR more than you should on a Manjaro installation? Just for your information; because Manjaro holds back packages for a couple of weeks, any package from the AUR might conflict with those ‘outdated’ packages and thus cause some breakage. If you really need those packages, then you should consider container solutions like Distrobox to resolve this. Note that trying things like installing a custom kernel won’t work through Distrobox.

So the main options probably consist of:

• Just plain Arch; archinstall has made it a lot easier to install. Furthermore, after everything is set and done, it can literally be Manjaro without outdated packages and less bugs etc, or actually whatever you would like your Linux installation to be. Setting up is the most daunting part though. Fortunately, the Arch Wiki does an excellent job in providing a resource at every set of the journey. Recommended if you’re not scared of setting up your system from a blank slate.

• Any other Arch-based distro, really. There are a ton of recommendations found in the other comments and there’s even more if you check out Distrowatch for Arch-based distros. If you kinda know what you’d want from a future system, but can’t be bothered with setting it up directly from Arch, then this might be recommended based on the specifics of your demands and to what degree existing distros align to that. For whatever it’s worth, I think Garuda Linux is an interesting option for those that want to move on from Manjaro. Similary to Manjaro, it’s opinionated on how your system is/should be configured. That’s why it’s also one of the few Arch-based distros (like Manjaro) that offers -out of the box- the means to rollback to a working system whenever anything unfortunate befalls your system, Garuda achieves this through coming pre-configured with Btrfs+Snapper. It should be noted, though, that Garuda is considered bloated by some. However only you can decide for yourself if their offering is bloated to you or not. So check out its Xfce edition -or any that sound interesting to you- for yourself, if you’re interested. If you think it’s interesting, but are still too much bothered by the bloat, then perhaps their Lite versions are more to your liking.

There are a lot of options beyond Arch-based distros. However, as I don’t know what made you gravitate towards Manjaro in the first place and what you’ve come to (dis)like since, it’s hard to pinpoint what exactly you’d like. If the AUR has been your main reason for using Manjaro in the first place, then it’s important to note that Distrobox also grants access to the AUR from any of the other popular distros out there. So you’re not confined to just using Arch(-based distros) unless you really need some custom kernel that is somehow only available in the AUR.

• If you checked out Manjaro for its unsuccessful attempt at providing a stable rolling release, then you should check out the most successful attempt with openSUSE Tumbleweed. It has a respectable amount of packages and enables users through OBS (OpenSUSE Build Service) to extend this significantly. Its installer offers the option to go for a minimal installation.
• If rolling release has scarred you, but you still want up-to-date packages, then consider Fedora. Huge community, AUR-like repo in COPR and once again a very respectable amount of packages make it definitely worth a mention. It offers the so-called Fedora Everything ISO (Network Installer) that acts as the installer for minimal systems.

I wouldn’t call a project with over 6k upvotes (and counting) on Github underappreciated. Perhaps what you tried to convey is that -surprisingly enough- the community is split on how they view Distrobox within the grand scheme of things. I simply can’t fathom anyone to be unappreciative of what it achieves and how. However, there are those that might regard it as one of the rising stars that represent a big upcoming change that might even be -in their eyes- an existential threat to Linux. They fear that containers, immutable distros and all of that ‘mumbo jumbo’ will threaten the freedom in which they interact with their systems. They don’t see them as (potential) solutions to long-held problems, but instead they are viewed as invasive to Linux and an attempt to <insert proprietary OS>-ify Linux and thus as an assault to Linux’ uniquely strong qualities. I wonder if if this might be somehow philosophically rooted in how some people lean towards conservatism, while others lean towards progressivism instead.

But yeah, Distrobox is excellent.

In the past year or so, literally everybody and their mother, decided to join the immutable bandwagon that has been going strong for quite some time. About half of these rely on Distrobox (or very similar solutions) to ensure the desired feature set functions properly. Unsurprisingly, it has also been featured on conferences.

Furthermore, Distrobox itself has been featured in some capacity in a lot of different Linux-related news outlets. And I haven’t even mentioned how many times Linux content creators on YouTube have featured it in their videos.

It would be awesome if people that are still bereft of the features that are provided through Distrobox would somehow get to learn about it. Today has been ‘your awakening’, so feel free to spread the good word and perhaps others will follow suit.

has anyone here used this who can comment on it?

I’ve been on uBlue since a couple of months. Initially, I just rebased to their silverblue-main image because it offered a more sane image to build upon as all of their images have already applied every relevant step everyone does to their ‘Silverblue-systems’ anyways; codecs, enabling hardware-acceleration, support for nvidia + secureboot when applicable etc. But recently I’ve started building my ‘own’ image using their toolkit and it has been a blast. I’m a huge fan of what NixOS and Guix do in the space of declarative distros. However, unfortunately, I had my reasons to not go down that route. The toolkit offered by uBlue enables me to have (pretty much) a declarative system on a more traditional -albeit ‘immutable’- distro. If one desires reproducibility, atomic updates, very high security-standards and a pinch of declarativity to eliminate bitrot, configuration drift, unknown states etc; then one simply can’t ignore uBlue’s offerings as one of if not the best solution out there.

i see a lot of recommendations for nobara, but this seems to do a similar thing in a more convenient and reversible way

Nobara is great and does indeed have similar design goals; namely improving the stock experience. To put it bluntly; Nobara is to Fedora Workstation what uBlue (thus including Bazzite) is to Fedora Silverblue. To be clear; uBlue offers a fleet of different (base-)images; thus enabling everyone to use their favorite desktop environment on their ‘Immutable’ Desktop; even those beyond GNOME, KDE and Sway that Fedora itself supports on their ‘Immutable Desktops’. So in that sense -perhaps paradoxically- Nobara is more rigid on install than uBlue, while the latter is the one referred to as ‘immutable’. It’s perhaps important to note that uBlue is not a distro; at least not in the traditional sense:

“This isn’t a distribution, you can always rebase back to Fedora without reinstalling. This is a unique relationship between an upstream and downstream that is popular in cloud, but still new to the Linux desktop. “Custom images” seems to be a decent place to start since that’s what people call them in cloud.”

I agree that having better GUI is a generally good thing and that most of us would benefit from it. However it’s false to state or believe that Linux in its totality is bereft of this. Distros like openSUSE, MX Linux and Garuda Linux have put in considerable effort into offering tools that enable one to config a lot of stuff through a GUI. However, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to complain about the lack of GUIs if you (or whosoever for that matter) don’t use one of these distros. Arch has minimalism as one of its design goals, so you either have to find the binaries/apps/packages (or whatsoever) that allow you to config through a GUI or you’re out of luck.

The GUI elements missing in Arch are missing in Mint and Ubuntu, Fedora, PopOS, all of them.

I would agree that they’re roughly in the same ballpark as long as you had picked KDE Plasma on Arch. Though I would argue that Mint and PopOS have a noticeable lead, though I don’t think that point deserves more discussion. However, none of them come close to something like openSUSE’s YaST or MX’ Tools. That’s why I deliberately mentioned them. Perhaps worth a watch for those wondering how Windows compares to different Linux distros GUI-wise.

I happen to be struggling through an audio issue right now. Can you find an OS that lets you change the Audio sample and bit rates without messing with config files ? This is basic function, and the PulseAudio and Pipewire have been around long enough for a GUI to have been created, but no, it doesn’t exist.

I’m unfortunately unaware of any solution for that. Wish you good luck!

without using special tools like respin and archiso

What do you exactly mean with this?

• Can we suggest any package/tool that you have to install?
• Did you intend to convey a solution that’s independent of an existing distro?
• Do you want the custom distro/iso to only do its thing until installation? Or are you perhaps interested in something more declarative that can continue to exist and be (one of) the primary means to config your system?
• Could you explain to us how your envisioned solution looks like?

Sorry for asking these questions, but it was either this or a very very long post satisfying all kinds of different criteria. Thanks you in advance for answering any of the questions!

Would you be fine with some tooling that enables one to make their own custom iso from an existing distro? This path still allows for a substantial amount of freedom, though it’s not a blank slate by any stretch of the imagination. But it makes up for it with how relatively easy and painless it can be.

Or would you instead like to get into the nitty-gritty of things and want all the freedom you’d want? This increased freedom does come with a substantial cost in convenience and labour.

Pick your poison :P . I’ll be waiting ;) .

So taking your other comment into consideration as well, I suppose the following would be the easiest good setup:

1. Install Debian Stable using the image for a minimal network install onto a secondary device or onto a partition of your main device (multi-boot). Make sure to only include the stuff you think you’d need.
2. Install all of your favorite tools within that Debian Stable installation.
3. Use the excellent penguins-eggs package to make a live image out of it.
4. Install the live image onto your favorite USB with whichever tool you like; personally I enjoy using ventoy.
5. Profit :P .

If my proposed solution doesn’t quite fit your needs, then please feel free to correct me!

Good questions!

I assume getting a persistent environment in a USB recovery stick is a bigger task?

I actually don’t know if penguins-eggs allows persistent environments 🤔 . Though, other tools might be better fit for the job. Personally I’d recommend you to follow this guide for openSUSE Leap. A similarly good guide/documentation for Debian is absent, and openSUSE Leap is likewise a good fit due to it being supported over a longer time period as well. The steps outlined in the guide might be a bit more involved, but the team behind openSUSE have done a wonderful job to ensure accessibility.

I’m imagining that, with your method, I would need to repeat this process any time I wanted to update the image or load specific new kernel modules/drivers?

With the method outlined in my previous comment, you only have to repeat the process from scratch if you didn’t save the Debian install some way or another. If you did keep the Debian install around, then you could just; open it up, apply some updates/changes or (un)install additional packages and make yet another live image out of it. Granted, the openSUSE Leap persistent Live USB that has been previously mentioned in this comment is easier to change later down the line regardless.

Btw, -to my knowledge- the persistent Live USB environment is also possible on other distros like Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu etc. So arguably it’s best to first look at which distro satisfies your needs in regards to package availability. After which, in my opinion, LTS/Stable releases ought to be preferred over the others.