Fedora if you do not gain joy from troubleshooting

Debian sid if you do.

you should be good after installing the optional dependencies

NIXOS never worry about this every again

I've been enjoying Guix for the last 8 days. You declare your OS and home config in a file and you can check them into source control. It was originally a fork of NixOS, but has diverged a lot.

The CLIs and APIs are pretty nice. They have a concept of "channels", which are git repos you can download software from. The default official channel only hosts FOSS software, but you can trivially add non-FOSS channels and they work just as well as the first-party channels.

Each channel update and package install, removal, update get put on a log, which you can trivially jump between. guix package --switch-genereation=28 and boom you're at that generation (it's like a git commit). The software and config changes get saved in the generation so the jump is clean and atomic. I actually bisected my OS yesterday to track a bug! That was cool. You can also create and share isolated, reproducible environments.

Guix works with Flatpak and distrobox as well, in case some software isn't available in existing channels. I got HiDPI, Zoom, Logseq, Syncthing, and Tailscale working.

The biggest drawback for me so far is that it doesn't use systemd. Not sure if it's a dealbreaker for me yet. Systemd does way more than just manage system services, so GNU Shepherd (which Guix uses) isn't a real replacement.

I recently switched to Void after making runs with Arch and Fedora.

I'm not anti-systemd. I just like Void. Rolling release model. Light weight. Minimalistic. I've read how the package manager is small but for me everything I need is there. That's the first time that's happened for me as with other distros I would have had to install via flatpak, snap by source, appimage and by the package manager.

Not sure if that would work for your use case or not.

Off-topic: A meta-analysis if you will, but I'm just astonished by the engagement this post has received. I wonder what this tells us about the Linux community on Lemmy.

On-topic: OP, honestly, others have chimed in and left very good answers already. So perhaps you won't find anything within my comment that hasn't been said. But, as I'm a latecomer to this thread, I might have an advantage that some didn't (try to capitalize on). To be blunt, the original post didn't reveal much about what you liked and didn't like about Arch. As such, my initial impression would have been to suggest Gentoo. But, you've since provided the engaging community crucial insights that help us in grasping the full picture. Below you may find my own notes on your distro preferences based on what you said:

• care-free updates
• repo packages receive updates shortly after upstream
• rewards effort put into initial setup

Furthermore, I'll take the liberty to assume that (native) package availability is expected to be vast. And that you wish for the process of updating to be snappy.

Based on the above, I recommend NixOS.

If jumping ship to NixOS seems too daunting, then consider installing Nix^[To be clear, I meant the package manager. Determinate System's installer is probably your best option.] on Arch. Consider to slowly but surely expand its usage within your system. And, then, when you're comfortable, embrace NixOS as a worthy successor to your Arch installation.

NixOS might not be for you, it is horrible if you don't want to adapt to it. But if this happened on NixOS, you would just reboot into the state of your computer before you ran the update. Or if it's just a program like VLC you could just close VLC switch to the previous generation and open VLC again