For a long time, I used Debian. I still run it on my office laptop. It is hard not to respect a distro with that kind of stubborn integrity, quietly holding up half the internet without ever caring about being cool.
Debian users want predictability above all else. They have the energy of someone who picks a matte-black business laptop with zero bells and whistles, leaves the settings stock, and expects it to boot the exact same way every morning for five years. A computer is a tool, not a science experiment.
Naturally, I stayed far away from Arch. Everything I heard made it sound like an exhausting hobby: unstable, fragile, and demanding constant babysitting.
Then Debian 13 arrived and broke my audio on my PC and laptop.
I tried to fix it properly. When that failed, I gave up and wrote a shell alias called fixsound. Every time I had a Zoom meeting or wanted to play music, I had to run it first.
It worked, but it was a pathetic little ritual. It let me pretend everything was fine while I spent my day tiptoeing around my own machine.
Two weeks ago, I finally got fed up and installed EndeavourOS.
It turns out Arch is not a grenade waiting to go off. EndeavourOS gives you a clean starting point without hiding how the system actually works. You manage the machine yourself, keep backups, read the update notes, and know what you have installed.
Two weeks in, the system is dead quiet. Zoom works. Music works, everything is fine. I finally deleted the fixsound alias.
Frozen stability is great right until a driver slips through the cracks.