I have some alternatives now - no excuse for not trying a few out. :-)

Many thanks to all those who replied.

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Sid should have his hide tanned too? lol

Distrowatch did a test last year over several months to see which rolling release was the most reliable: the winner was Arch. ArchBang and Bridge are both installers that will set up Arch for you, saving you an afternoon (and perhaps some hair-tearing!) Arch also has the best Wiki of any distro, in my experience.

I agree with that statment, I've even used it for different Distro's to get HOW TO's on things I'm going to install, and configuring information, as well as trouble shooting.

Just my 2 cents on automated ARCH installers... kind of defeats the point of ARCH. The ARCH wiki will take you through it step by step, which is more in the philosophy of the distro IMO.

Certainly though ARCH is one of the most stable and best maintained distros out there... perhaps even the best maintained distro for what it tries to be.

Minimal is more stable but I always keep adding stuff, I do like forks but a spoon is better.

It's a pain in my ROY AL Butt to install ARCH.. though I did just get through installing bridge Arch on VBox -- I liked the installer it uses very easy ... none of that what arch has one go through and I don't have two pcs one hooked up the the internet so I can follow the install how to's while doing it to the other pc ... , in my option they really need to update how it gets installed. it is not like it will not work if they put a modern day installer on it. It is the 21st. century after all

if I didn't add anything to the distro I install I'd not have much to do but look at the screen. it is really minininininimal

which i like because that I only have what I install in it. Outside the oS'

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is very current, rolling-release, and has been quite stable for the ~9 months I've been using it as the sole OS on my every-day laptop.

Thanks chaps. Being a bit nervous about jumping straight in to Arch, I'm now giving Manjaro a whirl in a VirtualBox environment - liking it a lot so far.

Edit: If anyone else reading this gives Manjaro KDE (I'm running 15.12) a go in VirtualBox, don't enable 3D acceleration as doing so renders the KDE desktop pretty much invisible.

Normally I would +1 for Arch but lately it won't let me shutdown or restart my computer without switching to a different TTY... Maybe it's just gnome :/

Arch was my second distro back around 1995 now and I still like it, am using it on my Pi. As for your issue Imgibson1981 I don't kno, sound like a process? you could start a new thread in the LQ\Arch form.

I didn't suggest Manjaro, as I never think of that as "bleeding edge". I've always liked it, and I don't think you'll be disappointed. A lot of people do find installed distros behave better than virtualised ones.

OpenSuse is my current favorite.

Indeed I'm not disappointed, David - it's a nice distro, particularly the Manjaro Settings Manager's Kernels section that allows me to update to the latest kernel and keeps a nice track of the different kernels I have installed. Ok, so KDE5 crashes every two minutes if I'm working on desktop settings, but it starts up again immediately afterwards.

No, probably not bleeding edge, but I'm crawling slowly towards that edge... ;-)

I've decided to keep it virtualised at the moment because I'm going to be using it for mucking around with filesystems and partitioning, and probably want to keep that at hand's length from my working PC. Also, this report from Deodimedo didn't inspire confidence in Manjaro's handling of partitioning/chaining: http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/m...5-12-xfce.html .