[blueflow]

Distro doesn't matter that much, its mostly the desktop environment (panels and settings), and kernel regressions. Like half of my thinkpad fleet now boots into a blank screen due to an regression in the Linux i915 driver.

I used to run Alpine Linux on servers, decided i wanted to change to something less exotic and found that Debian is no less buggy. No idea how to go on.

Windows is consistently worse, i haven't tried macOS as it is not really popular here.

[homebrewer]

Try linux-lts. The latest "stable" releases of the kernel (since 6.10 onwards) have felt like they weren't tested at all, major regressions in every single version. I report them, but new problems keep coming. Never seen anything like that in two decades of being a mostly/only linux user.

The lts is fine, no problems at all.

[wakawaka28]

The Linux Foundation cut funding for LTS releases: https://www.zdnet.com/article/long-term-support-for-linux-ke... They only spend a small percentage of their money on maintaining the kernel. So I think if you want a stable kernel you need to find someone downstream willing to do that work.

[blueflow]

I see Alpine 3.20 still ships 6.6, I'll grab an ISO and check if works, thanks!

[rbanffy]

I suggest going with a Red Hat-like OS such as CentOS stream. It's boring, but my experience is that it's rock solid (when paired with good hardware).

What were the issues you faced with Debian on your servers?

[the-grump]

Distro matters a lot for kernel regressions.

I run arch and so I bump into those once in a blue moon but it's rare.

Debian runs older versions so you miss recent bug fixes but at the same time you should see minimal regressions. Pick your poison.

You might be extra sensitive to bugs. I'm that way too but at least I can fix them when I have the source.

I also only use a few apps (Firefox, eMacs, VLC, gimp) and i3 as my window manager. It's been a long time since I hit a bug that actually impacted usability.

[blueflow]

Debian is supposed to be stable, but the last time apt hosed itself is barely two weeks ago.

The suggestion with the bug sensitivity is belittling, cut that out.

[seba_dos1]

I've seen pacman and opkg hose themselves. I've never seen apt & dpkg hose itself since 2006 when I started using it. Usually when people say that it's hosed, it's actually successfully detecting and preventing breakage to the system that other package managers would happily let you commit, and it's allowing you to unwrap and fix stuff without having to hose the whole system and start from scratch.

I have utmost respect to apt, especially since I switched my daily workstation to Arch and learned how the life without it looks like.

[ruthmarx]

What does apt do that pacman doesn't?

[seba_dos1]

Gracefully handle edge cases. I've seen pacman continuing as normal and pretending that everything is fine, burying the error in the middle of several screens of logs, when free disk space temporarily went down to zero during system upgrade. That just doesn't happen with apt, where you're usually `dpkg --configure -a` away from recovering from most disasters.

There's also a matter of packaging practices, which isn't entirely a pacman vs. apt thing but rather Arch vs. Debian (although package manager design does influence and is influenced by packaging practices). In Arch, the package manager will happily let you install or keep an out-of-epoch package installed during an upgrade that will just fail to function. apt usually won't let you proceed with an upgrade that would lead to such outcome in the first place. It's a thing that's ridiculously easy to stumble upon as soon as you use AUR, but since user's discovery of the issue is delayed, most people probably don't attribute it to package management at all - they just see an application getting broken one day for some unknown reason, while apt screams at them and appears broken right away when they try to use apt.

To be frank, I don't know for sure that relations between packages that Debian uses couldn't all be expressed with pacman, maybe it's possible. What I know though is that I've never seen a Debian-like system that used pacman, and I know that makepkg-based tooling is very far away from debhelper so even if it's theoretically possible with pacman, you'd have a long way to get there with your tooling anyway.

[rbanffy]

> the last time apt hosed itself is barely two weeks ago

How did you manage to do that? I use Debian on about half my home fleet (about a dozen machines or so) and apt has caused me no issues in the past decade and half.

[the-grump]

How is it belittling when I told you I'm that way too.

What I'll actually cut out is responding. Good luck with your bugs.

[croemer]

Agreed with you, I'm also sensitive to bugs and it's not belittling.

[jazzyjackson]

I'm addicted to Gnome Fedora since Asahi gave me the option, having one button that brings up a combination of Mission Control and Spotlight has soured my on Mac OS, why are these two different actions?

I haven't had to go into the shell to change anything yet, the default files, software center all work as I expect out of the box, including mounting USB drives which has always been an annoyance to me.

Now I'm investing in learning CentOS Stream and SELinux, happy with the learning curve thus far.

[anonzzzies]

> Debian is no less buggy.

On servers? How do you notice? Maybe you are doing things we don't?

[croemer]

I'm happy with macOS, I know what to tweak and the display support is great. Ubuntu was very bad with fractional scaling for 4k displays. Maybe skill issue but the ARM Macs are just so fast, don't want to give up on that.

[gosub100]

the fact that you think "panels and settings" _is_ Linux tells me you dont know the basics of the OS itself. Linux is the kernel and drivers. Everything else is an application, if you don't like the UI/UX, that's between you and the FOSS maintainers, as well as your choice of interface to use. take some time to read up on the various options before you try to blame (what you think is) and entire OS.