Arch or Fedora?

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I love Arch. It works well on my laptop. I can change and manipulate what I need to when I need to. There are just a few things I don't like such as not being able to get Steam to work.

I also love Fedora. It works beautifully on my desktop. But it just doesn't work as well on my laptop. But I can get Steam and other things to work well.. I am debating on installing Fedora on my laptop even though it uses more resources and doesn't "feel" right...

My laptop is a Dell Inspiron N7110 and no matter what I pick either will have to use the XFCE desktop environment. Resource consumption is a huge deal since the computer is getting old and has been beaten up by my kids from time to time and XFCE seems to be one that I like and is fairly light.

What would you pick? I can't decide. This may or may not sway my decision, I am just curious to see people's response.

I think it comes down to whether you like the extras in the Arch AUR versus ease of installing Steam. Actually, I thought Steam could run in Arch, but I'm not sure how well it runs.

I'd also wonder if there are derivatives of Fedora or Red Hat that might use less resources.

I have looked through the Arch wiki (which I love BTW) and have read about installing a multilib. But my laptop is i686 so I shouldn't need it. I have also read about deleting a .so file, but I cannot find it in my system for the life of me. Here is the error I get in the terminal..

Installing breakpad exception handler for appid(steam)/version(0)
libGL error: unable to load driver: i965_dri.so
libGL error: driver pointer missing
libGL error: failed to load driver: i965
libGL error: unable to load driver: swrast_dri.so
libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast

If I can get steam to run, that would be the deciding factor to stick with Arch. I can still do my Fedora testing while on Arch

hm...

I had a libgl error too but it was related to 64-bit as I remember now. Are your video drivers installed? Also are you running a custom kernel? Cause your need to recompile the graphics driver for any custom kernels.

Try,

you could try running manjaro, it is arch based.
if i'm not mistaken the mcole (cupoflinux) spin off of manjaro does include steam.

Arch is essentially a 'bleeding edge' distro. Fedora OTOH, is RHEL's testing and development area. You might want to try Debial stable, or a spin on Debian stable, such as BunsenLabs which is the community driven continuation of CrunchBang Linux.

It's light, fast, and stable, and has no problem running on older hardware, and positively screams on newer hardware due to the fact that it's not as resource heavy. --You should have no problem running Steam on it.

These are all awesome tips. I really want to stay away from Ubuntu as I ran that for a few years and.. well.. just got sick of it. I like it for my server that I mess with but for a laptop I would like a something with a little more learning experience. That is nothing again anyone who likes Ubuntu. It's solid and runs nice when maintained. I'll check out the BunsenLabs Distro though! I have heard of it but never used it.

I will definitely have to switch distros though *shedding tear*, I know I can use play on Linux to run Star Trek Online but running it on Steam seems like a better way to go about it. Also, there are some network drives I cannot access with Arch that I know my Desktop running Fedora can. it's just tough letting go *sniff sniff*.

No problem. I've been using it as my main OS for a good while now, and I quite like it. It's not perfect, but no OS is.