Not the person you’re asking, but I went the other way around like you, the main reason for me was that mealie can extract and import from plaintext, so it’s easier to migrate away if I ever want to. I rather have things closer to plaintext whenever possible.

I think you’re suffering a bit from this: https://xkcd.com/2501/

You know the feeling you have about Gentoo? That’s the feeling for someone going to Linux, even to Ubuntu, the more complications you add the worse the feeling is.

Arch is not hard, it’s not complicated, but there’s a lot of unknowns unknowns that can bite a newcomer in the ass. If you’re already familiar with Linux Arch is easy peasy, just like Gentoo, it’s just some small things you have to learn.

Think about it this way, you’re already familiar with 99% of what Gentoo will ask of you and still it’s not something you’re up for doing, imagine the frustration of not knowing what’s anything and having to go through that.

Re-read my post, and tell me where did I said Arch is complicated? My view is summarized in the last paragraph, and I can summarize it even more here “good, but not beginner friendly”. Arch expects you to know how to deal with it, it expects you to read the news, it expects you know how to downgrade a package and it expects you’re comfortable in a terminal. A newcomer is unlikely to even know about any of that, they already have to learn a lot of other things like package manager, learning what’s the name of each program and how they behave slightly different from what they’re used to, etc, they don’t need to learn about pacnew/pacsave files on top of all of that. If you’re already comfortable in Linux, yeah, Arch is amazing, but if you’re presented with a terminal not even knowing what KDE/Gnome are you’re going to have a bad time.

And that’s the thing, it’s not that it’s complicated, but it’s the unknowns unknowns that will get a new user, they don’t know they need a session manager, they don’t know they need a printer daemon, etc. And if you bypass that by using Manjaro/Cachy, you’re now in a position of using a distro that expects you to know about that but didn’t taught you about them.

You know the weirdest part? Arch used to have a TUI installer when I first migrated to it, it lost it at some point between 2009 and 2012 (since I discovered it didn’t existed anymore on a laptop I bought in 2012. Weird that they redid an installer after all these years (and yeah, I know that technically pacstrap is an installer, but it doesn’t do much)

most recommended was debian and debian based. But I for myself(Even though the post says otherwise) now chose to use an arch based distro

Why are you asking our opinion on the matter since you clearly have made up your mind already?

because of the better supported and newer nvidia drivers

Newer doesn’t necessarily mean better, there’s a reason other d’Ístria delay packages and it has to do with compatibility and finding early bugs.

as well as automatic hardware detection.

What? Debian based distros have automatic hardware detection, Arch expects you to know your hardware and install things accordingly. Hell, almost nothing in Arch is automatic.

So I wanted to hear some experiences of you, that you may have had in the past considering EndeavourOS, CachyOS, Manjaro and Arch itself.

I used Arch as my main distro for over 15 years, it’s a great distro it has a lot of advantages in my book and it’s still the distro I feel most at home with. But it’s definitely NOT beginner friendly, you’ll get the latest packages with the latest bugs and incompatibilities, sure you might get the latest performance gains, but that’s when you’re not facing the latest regressions in performance or in compatibility.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love Arch and have it on some of my systems, but it’s something that you have to know how to deal with.

I personally have gone for Manjaro now

If you must use Arch go with plain Arch. Manjaro and others essentially give you a pretty GUI installer, nothing more, and they cost you the customization of building your system from the ground up and knowing how to rebuild and fix if things go wrong for whatever reason (plus every Arch community will first ask what distro you’re running, and if it’s not pure Arch they won’t even look at your post). Also worth mentioning, AUR packages are built for Arch, they might work on Manjaro or Cachy, but they might also not due to the slight version variations.

In short, I think Arch is a great system, but it has some difficulties attached to it that could potentially make it a problem for someone that wants something that “just works”, which is what most new users want, whether they admit it or not.

Uhh, that’s hard… I guess I would say, in no particular order:

• Dead Cells
• Factorio
• Outer wilds
• Dwarf Fortress
• SOMA

I spent a while getting Ansible to be able to setup and maintain my server(s). And ended up not using it as much as I should, mostly because the computer I used to run Ansible from became a “Steam Machine” so I’m rarely sitting on it with a keyboard now and I don’t want to have personal info and keys on my work computer.

But it was a good learning, and useful while I used it. Now I just use ssh and compose files directly.

PiGallery is what you’re asking for, but you should consider Immich, it’s very simple to setup and you’ll get tons of features more that are extremely useful. I get you want something simple, but I don’t feel Immich is hard to setup or maintain, and it’s the difference between a simple photo gallery and google photos.