I'm afraid simple and easy don't go well together.

You either have automation to make things easy to the user, but then it's no longer simple.

Or you require the user to do everything manually, but then it's no longer easy.

True. Maybe there's a viable middle ground between Ubuntu & Arch.

Perhaps with a focus on the audience (e.g. a web dev distro), it becomes viable to make sensible compromises on both (easiness & simplicity) that result in a good combination for the user.

Have you looked at EndeavourOS?

kali

That's just Debian

For general audiences, Manjaro (arch base) fits your ask pretty well, I think. I ran into problems installing arch, switched to Manjaro, and never looked back.

Pop_os! is coming from the other direction, but I found I prefer using i3/sway instead as I had trouble configuring certain things about pop.

Perhaps Manjaro? It tries to be a more user-friendly Arch-like distro.

Slackware.

Only reason I've seen to use anything else is if doing a full desktop installation doesn't make sense, as the installer is largely geared around just installing most everything, or perhaps leaving out a category or two. Beyond that, the documentation is clear, and it's made as easy to use as makes sense without just hiding things behind a black box so that when things go wrong, they REALLY go wrong.

Nice to see some of these newer distros like Arch and Ubuntu are coming along though; choice is good.

This summarises my feelings so far precisely. Alas, I’m not quite sure it’s possible to have this: the easier and more full-featured something is to use out of the box, the more components it needs — or at least, its components become more complicated in and of themselves.

One alternate approach I’ve seen is that of NixOS: everything is declaratively specified in a single place, so it’s easy to configure stuff, but also easy to see how everything works. I actually tried out NixOS before installing Arch on the aforementioned desktop box, and if it wasn’t for the sheer opaqueness of Nixpkgs I’d still be using it. On the other hand, I can hardly call Nix ‘simple’… as with everything, it’s all tradeoffs, I suppose.

As I developer I solved my issues with arch using the latest dev tools in arch and running the code in a docker container. That way I also solve all developers issues with dependencies as everybody runs the same docker container with the same libraries.

Check out endeavouros. It is arch with an opinionated installer and WM/DE setup, but then you get a pretty standard arch setup and it’s great.

IMO it combines the best of both worlds.

I've been installing Ubuntu this week. Checking download updates during install gave me a broken libc dependency graph which blocked installing ssh or gcc. Libpci-dev conflicts with gnome as far as I can tell, installing that took down X and the network. Changing to the server iso of the same version gave me an OS that can't use the builtin intel NIC, though the desktop version can. The driver errors on modprobe, -2.

I'm going to try again with a different Ubuntu release as soon as I can find the patience. Where prior lessons have taught me to vandalise automatic update or it'll brick itself in the future.

Ease of use has not been the defining characteristic of Ubuntu.

I'm now firmly confirmed that it is Ubuntu that fucks something up. Upgrades seem to work much better with plain Debian.

We've seen many failures during upgrade, from both novice and advanced linux users, meanwhile one of our sysadmins accidentally upgraded Debian by two releases at once (From Debian 9 to 11) and it still "just worked"...

I had pretty constant issues with Ubuntu every time I've tried it as well.

I run pure Debian stable everywhere I can in my personal life (laptops, desktops, servers). It's predictable and there's not a lot of planning at update OR upgrade time. Backup, push the button, reboot, done.

Just kidding, backups happen daily automatically, so it's just update and reboot.

Debian occasionally falls over on me when running unstable but that's kind of the point. Testing hasn't failed on me in at least a decade.

Same experience from my days in Ubuntu world, it sure is relatively easy for a first time linux user but I had so many issues on it that were completely obscure. I had the feeling of fighting against the system itself all the time.

With arch, sometimes it breaks (not that often), it always is quite clear what went wrong (pacman errors are limpid, logs are clear). You'll find the fix on the Arch Linux News, in the wiki or the forums. Bonus you probably know your system better and as a side effect be more efficient in fixing it.

> If we could combine Ubuntu's easiness of use with Arch's simplicity and performance, that'd be my ideal distro for work.

You're describing endeavourOS. It's Arch, but with an installer that gets you a sane default desktop quickly.

It's what I use now that I'm too old to waste all that time it takes to get Arch running properly

Manjaro Linux is what you are looking for then.