i have zorin mainly because it supports my Radeon RX 7800XT but otherwise it's basically equivalent to ubuntu 24 - probably worth paying for Pro for the better visual i think (because gnome project are such a bunch of mac loving jackasses who think X is obsolete)
for mostly dev reasons i just stick to the debian base... arch is nice but for me it's like half way back to BSD which i'd switch to in a heartbeat if it wasn't for all this wayland gnome hardware support shit
I've played around with Zorin and REALLY like it, it's one of my major considerations for a main distro when I switch from Windows 10 next October. The reason I'm considering an Arch distro is just because almost all of my experience with Linux so far has been in Debian-based distros, and I think it'd be good to branch out a bit. Given the fact that I'm aiming to get myself a Steam Deck in the near future, and SteamOS is based off of Arch, it also wouldn't hurt to get comfortable with Arch-based distros at just a surface level.
That said, I don't know if I'll ever go fully with an Arch-based distro as my main distro. I'm considering Garuda as my main, but that's the only Arch-based distro I could ever see myself using... and even then, I'm far from 100% on that, given the rolling release breakage that can happen.
I just loaded EndeavourOS (bare metal) onto my computer last night, only for KDE Plasma 6 but I might revert back to MX Linux a trusty old Debian base. I really liked MX Linux but Debian is slow to update. Very stable and difficult to break on day to day use.
i don't think steamos is based on arch? pretty sure the whole edifice of steam on linux is based on debian based containers, if you have a steam installation on linux you will find the word "debian" in dozens of folder names in most of the installations
what arch really has over debian based distros though is how easy it is to manage kernels better, and all the nixos loonies rave about their configuration system but Arch is the king of custom installation scripting with AUR, and nobody has really improved on it except making it more complicated and opaque
and i should add that the original was BSD Ports
I could have sworn I read somewhere that it was based on Arch, but I could be completely wrong. Unless we're talking about a difference between the OS on Steam Machines versus the Steam Deck, I did hear that there is a significant difference between SteamOS versions on both of those.
