What about Arch?

Arch users may be shocked to find their distro of choice not mentioned in this page on new technology, and perhaps they have a point. But then so too might Gentoo or Linux from Scratch users, who also have access to the latest versions of everything, and can also compile it with whatever optimisations suit their CPU. We’ve focused instead on what distros offer out of the box, and with Arch, and more so with Gentoo, well, you barely get a box. Be that as it may, Jonni uses Arch, and so should you.

Manjaro did the unthinkable and made Arch Linux easy to use, and continues to be one of the most popular desktop distros around. Manjaro doesn’t (directly) use the same repositories as its progenitor, since things move quickly on Arch, and Manjaro has a release cadence to follow (and a desire not to break its own packages). So you won’t find quite the same bleeding-edge versions as you would in Arch, but the selection will be far from stale. And bugs that may have found their way into the stable Arch repos will have been ironed out by the time they reach Manjaro. We like that Manjaro is getting the Xfce desktop some attention. Lightweight doesn’t have to mean light on features. And if you want a beautiful take on KDE’s Plasma desktop you can also get that through Manjaro’s Plasma edition.