Thanks for the write up. I also looked into running Resolve but the lack of AAC/MP4 support was the kicker.
Funnily enough, my personal experience aligns with yours - Fedora and I just seem to fundamentally dislike each other. I've tried it several times, as it looks good on paper, but I've had significantly had more issues with it than I ever have with Arch/EndeavourOS.
Mint and Endeavour are pretty much the only distros I'll ever need, I've come to the conclusion.
My distain toward Fedora is IBM/fedoras obstinate to not deliver non-FOSS apps in the official repos. I understand their decision. But forcing users rely on third party projects like RPM Fusion to use non free apps doesn't feel like a good solution.
If Fedora offered out of the box or an easy method to enable this I wouldn't have an issue. Even dnf can be forgiven if it didn't ask so much from the end user.
Endeavour with KDE is honestly godlike. It simply works. occasionally nvidia drivers break initramfs and there was the broken grub issue, but the only other distro I have around is Pop on a laptop I dont want to update frequently and I can only just tolerate it since I dont play games or record/edit on it, anything with no AUR would just be painful otherwise
Yeah, same. Whenever I try out another distro I find myself having to work harder to get things to set up the way I want, compared to Endeavour. Having the AUR at your fingertips makes you spoiled, for sure.
I wish there was a non rolling release distro that supported AUR, but it wouldn't really work. Some computers just need to work _every_time I turn them on though. Pop! does that (school laptop so no difficult stuff like games on it)
Understandable, although in my experience Endeavour has been as stable and easy to maintain as any point-release distro by simply 1) using the LTS kernel instead of the latest Arch kernel, and 2) using snapper/btrfs-assistant for backups, just in case.
Before I did #1, the most common problem I had was something breaking after a kernel update, but now my system has been running as a daily driver without any breakages or failed boots for over 8 months straight.
One of the devs over at the Endeavour forum did a write up that I think are some great tips to follow if you want to run a stable Arch installation:
To be honest, after my past few months of experience I would also go with endeavour on the laptop, but before then with a nvidia gpu it would occasionally just break in random ways (initramfs, dolphin wouldn't open, KDE desktop/panel config completely shot, font rendering randomly broken), but all those haven't happened lately so it probably would be fine now.