What is the crowd's opinion of Chakra?

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Yeah, I wouldn't want to package rpms either, and debs are marginally easier, I feel, but still a pain. It's been quite a few years since I've used anything but Chakra (a fork of Arch with a little more focus on stability, at the cost of bleeding-edge software; pacman -Syu seldom causes any problems, unlike vanilla Arch when last I used it), and I've never come across a better package manager than pacman (though the package format in the mini-distro Slitaz is comparable)...

>These vary between mediocre clones of Windows/Mac or just straight up bad.

What about Chakra though? It is not a clone of anything. Or Fedora, with the GNOME desktop environment. Both look very very nice to me, and GNOME especially is not a clone of anything at all. Kubuntu too.

>If you want Linux to have mass market appeal, it needs to compete out of the box.

Good point. Though it does look good out of the box in some distros, if Ubuntu looked nicer (to you and others who think it looks bad) it might have a larger appeal though. There's no point looking nice if no one sees the distros that do.

My 'main' computer is an HP Pavillion g6-1a50us laptop, which has a 2.30GHz AMD Athlon II Dual-Core CPU, 4GB of RAM, and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250 GPU (full specs). Admittedly, that's pretty old, but I've yet to come across a PC game I actually want to play that won't run in it yet. Also, $300 to $400 is more than I've ever paid for any computer (this one was $250 when I bought it used about 6 years ago, and that's the most money I've ever spent on a computer), and I wouldn't want a desktop computer as my 'main' anyway (I keep the old XP box hooked up for some classics, but rarely use it anyway since I seldom have time to sit at a desk at home).

But even if I had a really powerful computer, I'd still keep these old suckers around; I'm a bit of a collector of classic computers, including a 386, two 486 computers, two Apple II computers, and a Commodore VIC-20 (the only one I own that doesn't work, currently -- it needs a new power supply, I think)...

> But I think it may be a different generation from me or just different use cases.

If you're in your teens, then maybe it's a generation thing, but otherwise.... Well, I'll be 30 this year if that's any indication. So it's probably just different use cases; I haven't used Windows as my 'primary' OS in nearly a decade anyway, preferring GNU/Linux (specifically Chakra, a fork of Arch Linux), so gaming is obviously not my priority on PC (though I do use Wine to run the few games I play that aren't open source).

I love Arch and chakraOS (was based on Arch, nowdays independent thing), I have been using chakraOS for over 5 years...I'm currently using arch thanks https://arch-anywhere.org/ that is more of a lazy/easy way to install arch.

chakraOS is great pure Qt/KDE distro with half-rolling release model

> 1. What other distro options do I have? Are there any that keep core packages stable, like X11, xf86-video-intel, but still stay up to date on things like golang, rust, node, docker?

The only distro that I personally know which does that is Chakra. Mind that their other big philosophical thing is being 100% Qt. So, no Firefox or LibreOffice pre-installed or in the official repos. They have a community-repository which supposedly makes installing GTK-applications easy nonetheless. It's based on Arch.

> 2. If I do decide to try out OpenSUSE Tumbleweed again, on (more) open hardware, would I experience the same thing? Any XPS 13 users here who can vouch?

Probably not. For what it's worth, I run a fully updated openSUSE Tumbleweed (on an IdeaPad N581) and my X.org hasn't exploded yet. I'd assume, the issue was isolated to the Mac-hardware...

> 3. Is there anything I can do in the future to mitigate this regardless of what distro I choose? Like filesystem snapshots or a backup / restore point type of thing? Say I have a 1TB external hard drive to work with.

openSUSE has a tool called Snapper, which should've automatically created a snapshot prior to the update. On the boot-screen, you should be able to select to boot from that snapshot in read-only mode.

openSUSE can do this, because it uses btrfs by default for the root-partition. You could probably use this on other distros, too, although I haven't heard of many people who actually do it.

Otherwise, I believe the normal distro-independent solution is to set up your partition with LVM and then you can take snapshots with that, but I've honestly never done it.

Usually 3-4 times per year. We try to choose more mature releases unless there is some important feature or security fix. Our package groups wiki holds more info.

I see your point if it matches with your DE, but what if it doesn't. 2 examples: Solus: quality distro with innovative ideas (like their handling of steam deps) but they only do the Bungie DE.

Chakra OS: Nice rolling distro where core is like LTS and apps are rolling. It is KDE only and does KDE really well.

Both distros do their target market really well, but because they focus on that DE, it is exclusive to a small group. Which can be fine, but a niche shrinks the dev/admin pool and makes the project harder to maintain in the long run, I'd expect.