so a common claim I see made is that arch is up to date than Debian but harder to maintain and easier to break. Is there a good sort of middle ground distro between the reliability of Debian and the up-to-date packages of arch?
I’d say Fedora is the middle-ground. You get up-to-date software in a stable distribution with daily security updates, and fixed OS upgrades each year.
Debian Testing.
I like the idea of a stable distro as the host OS and Distrobox with Arch and the AUR for applications.
For most of my machines, I do not need the latest kernel or even the latest desktop environment. But it is a pain to have out of date desktop apps and especially dev tools.
I think this strikes a nice balance.
Opensuse tumbleweed. The packages go through a testing process unlike Fedora AFAIK.
Several months ago I installed Tumbleweed on a VM just for kicks and giggles. A week later it refused to install updates at all due to some weird conflict, even though the system was vanilla to the goddamn wallpaper. In a week I try upgrading and magically the conflict is gone. I’ll be honest, this was my only experience with Tumbleweed and it managed to have its update system broken in the meantime. I’ve never had anything close to this on Debian Unstable lol.
Not hating on Tumbleweed, on the contrary - I have been testing it for quite a while to see if it’s as good as they say. But it doesn’t look like a middle ground between Arch and Debian. At least in my short experience.
Was that updating with “zypper dup”? I’ve heard going through discover or zypper update isn’t the recommended way strictly speaking, so its worth mentioning.
It was a kde update centre which is installed by default and suggests updates when they’re available. But zypper was also failing.
Nobody here for Mint? I’m a long time Ubuntu user but when i do my next upgrade it will be to mint.
Both Ubuntu and mint are debian based.
which Debian? Have you considered Debian testing or unstable?
fedora atomic desktops (silverblue, kinoite, and derivatives like bluefin etc) are really great. They are as up-to-date as fedora, with an additional layer of stability provided by its atomic and image based nature.
Tumbleweed
another recomendation for Fedora from me
They don’t package LTS kernels which is pretty concerning—especially if using out-of-kernel modules that don’t always get released in lock step that could leave you with a machine that won’t boot.
That’s true. i do sometimes have issues with the ZFS package not compiling because of a too new kernel not being supported yet.
My recommendation would be Debian + Flatpak & Appimages (or + Snaps if you’re the devil). Super stable, but also access to the latest.
Fedora is also a middle ground too, but they’re pushing flatpaks heavily so it might not matter anyway since Fedora + flatpak and Debian + flatpak are about the same.
Probably not the place to ask, but. Say In a n00b and have Arch (EndeavourOS BTW) on a 15+ year old laptop. Everything works fine hardware wise. Software is fairly basic web, Inkscape, LibreOffice.
Do I really need all the latest Arch updates? Or can I just do an update say every 6 months?
This isn’t what Arch is for. Get a stable system with reasonable updates. If you are really looking for stable go Debian but if you want newer packages with major updates every 6 months go Fedora.
The issue with that is potentially keeping software which has security bugs on your system for longer than needed. Also, if you install new software you’ll have a partial upgrade which can degrade your system. If you don’t install anything though, your system should work as it currently does without issue. Unless a particular app takes something from the internet which may need the upgraded software (say, discord, spotify, etc. as they’re electron based.)
If that’s what you want to do I would suggest switching to xubuntu, mint xfce edition, DSL, etc. as they’ll still patch security updates in. You do you though of course as with your stated usecase I can’t see any functional issue. I don’t see the reason for arch though.
Replace Arch with Ubuntu and the answer is yes. Arch based that’s not a good idea.
The reason is that in 6 months lots can have changed, and Arch is not guaranteed a stable base, so updates might assume you have certain versions or things might break because you should have done a middle step during the upgrades that you didn’t which is now buried in months of update news in the wiki.
If you want to only update your system every six months, Arch is not ideal, it’s likely to work, but not guaranteed.
Thankfully, paru has an option to automatically show all Arch News before any -S operation.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
For private use? Hot take, but Arch. It’s easy to maintain and not easy to break at all. I think I spend zero time on maintenance other than running package updates. I only reinstall when I get a new computer.
(I say for private use only because you’ll be getting weird looks from people if you use arch on a server in a professional setting, and it might break if you try to update it after five years of not doing it since there aren’t any “releases” to group big changes - in practice I run arch on my home server too with no issues)
Save yourself some trouble and run something for servers. You can even setup automatic updates with reboots so you can set it up and forget. I did that with a Debian machine and I forgot about it for a terrifyingly long time. It just auto updated and patched itself when new updates hit.
You could… of course also try to use Debian Testing (which is more stable than Debian Unstable), but also more up to date than just Debian Stable.
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting And see also: https://www.debian.org/releases/testing/ (currently “trixie” is the testing release).
EDIT: I mention this, because nobody mentioned it yet.
Yes somebody did mention Debian Sid, which is Debian unstable. Which is maybe even more up to date (I still don’t consider it rolling release, because there will be a package freeze, if not multiple).
please do not use debian testing. it is not fit for production use and will give you headaches, especially when a new release starts approaching
Fedora is pretty good there, but I wouldnt use the DNF variants.
The atomic variants though totally rock. Atomic Desktops, IoT, etc.
The atomic model deals with all the troubles you would have with so new packages.
OpenSUSE slowroll would be a better middle-ground, but I have had strange broken packages and they dont have a useful atomic model, as it is not image-based.
The downside with the Atomic variants is that ostree is much slower and takes additional storage and bandwidth. It isn’t half bad if you are willing to reboot but it does add an additional layer of complexity.
I really need to try NixOS, it may be good?
It is very complicated for little value add. I would much rather use Ansible or bash scripting.
Ansible is useful in particular as it is much more repeatable and you can use Ansible pull to pull from a git repo
The thing is package management, resettability, rebasing/redeploying with a config file, and avoiding config file creep.
I broke 10 distros before, and of course I also learned, but I simply didnt break Fedora Atomic Desktops in 2 years or so.
But I layer about 20 packages, which is not a really nice process on Atomic, while it works for sure.
I use Fedora silver blue and it is mostly solid. However, it isn’t something I would jump into without an interest in immutable Linux or embedded systems.
