Please understand that I haven’t tried or installed Arch Linux yet. From what I understand by reading and watching related videos, Arch is often breaks and a lot of time is required to fix issues. But I have also read comments from arch users who claim that arch has only crashed or caused them problems only a couple of times in a year.
Wouldn’t a stable or non rolling release distro be a great choice for the Steam Deck?? Also, how frequently do the packages get updated on steam os?
SteamOS is Arch-based. Arch as a distros is extremely bare-bones. The main difference between all base-distros is how they manage their packages.
Sub-distros may opt to change how the package manager works; Manjaro delays updates until everything has been verified to be working and not likely to break anything. Yet, it is still Arch based.
There’s nothing about a base-distro that makes it inherently unstable. Arch is extremely reliable, depending on what you need it for.
Manjaro isn’t great, but for a new Linux user, who doesn’t tinker, it’s quite reliable. Manjaro avoided the Grub crash earlier this year which every other Arch-based distro failed to boot from.
My recommendation is Endeavour, but having the Pamac Manjaro GUI makes things a lot less daunting for those trying Linux for the first time.
I learned this the hard way. Started with Manjaro because it was “easier”, and I had nothing but trouble. Switched to Arch, and it’s been smooth sailing.