[horsawlarway]

Yeah, the folks in here recommending Debian as a solution to this problem are insane.

I love Debian, it's a great distro. It's NOT the distro I'd pick to drive things like my laptop or personal development machine. At least not if you have even a passing interest in:

- Using team communication apps (slack/teams/discord)

- Using software built for windows (Wine/Proton)

- Gaming (of any form)

- Wayland support (or any other large project delivering new features relatively quickly)

- Hardware support (modern linux kernels)

I'd recommend it immediately as a replacement for Ubuntu as a server, but I won't run it for daily drivers.

Again - Arch (or it's derivatives) are basically the best you can get in that space.

[cosmic_cheese]

I think Debian Stable, Ubuntu LTS, and derivatives thereof are particularly poor fits for general consumers who are more likely to try to run the OS on a random machine they picked up from Best Buy that’s probably built with hardware that kernels any older than what ships in Fedora are unlikely to support.

The stable/testing/etc distinction doesn't really help, either, because it's an alien concept to those outside of technical spheres.

I strongly believe that the Fedora model is the best fit for the broadest spread of users. Arch is nice for those capable of keeping it wrangled but that's a much smaller group of people.

[horsawlarway]

I find this a very reasonable take.

I'll add - I think the complexity is somewhat "over-stated" for Arch at this point. There was absolutely a period where just reading the entire install guide (much less actually completing it) was enough to turn a large number of even fairly technical people off the distro. Archinstall removed a lot of that headache.

And once it's up, it's generally just fine. I moved both my spouse and my children to Arch instead of Windows 11, and they don't seem particularly bothered. They install most of their own software using flatpaks through the store GUI in Gnome, or through Steam, the browser does most of the heavy lifting these days anyways.

I basically just grab their machine and run `pacman -Syu` on it once in a while, and help install something more complicated once in a blue moon.

Still requires someone who doesn't mind dropping into a terminal, but it's definitely not what I'd consider "all that challenging".

[cosmic_cheese]

YMMV, but the issue I usually run into with Arch is that unless you watch patch notes like a hawk, updates will break random things every so often, which I found quite frustrating. The risk of this increases the longer the system goes without updates due to accumlated missing config file migrations and such.

Even as someone who uses the terminal daily it's more involved than I really care for.

[nickjj]

> but the issue I usually run into with Arch is that unless you watch patch notes like a hawk,

The good news is you can run `yay -Pwwq` to get the latest Arch news headlines straight in your terminal.

I've wrapped that with running `pacman -Syu` into a little helper script so that I always get to see the news before I run an update.

This is built into my dotfiles by default at https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles.

[Hazematman]

I agree that they are a poor fit for a random user especially for debian install being not as intuitive but for supporting hardware I disagree.

I decided to try debian stable on my brand new gaming PC and it worked fine out of the box. Combine with steam flatpak for gaming and I have less issues than my friends who game on Arch.

I agree though that Fedora is probably a good general recommendation.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

Over time I evolved to Debian testing for the base system and nix for getting precise versions of tools, which worked fairly well. But, I just converted my last Debian box to nixos

[bayindirh]

I'm using Debian testing in my daily driving desktop(s) for the last, checks notes, 20 years now?

Servers and headless boxes use stable and all machines are updated regularly. Most importantly, stable to stable (i.e. 12 to 13) upgrades takes around 5 minutes incl. final reboot.

I reinstalled Debian once. I had to migrate my system to 64 bit, and there was no clear way to move from 32 to 64 bit at that time. Well, once in 20 years is not bad, if you ask me.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

I've had a couple outages due to major version upgrades: the worst was the major version update that introduced systemd, but I don't think I've ever irreparably lost a box. The main reason I like nixos now is:

1) nix means I have to install a lot fewer packages globally, which prevents accidentally using the wrong version of a package in a project.

2) I like having a version controlled record of what my systems look like (and I actually like the nix language)

[bayindirh]

I prefer to isolate my development environment already in various ways (virtualenv, containers or VM depending on the project) so I don't need that parts of NixOS. My systems are already run on a well-curated set of software. Two decades allowed me to fine tune that aspect pretty well.

While I understand the gravitas of NixOS, that modus operandi just is not for me. I'm happy and fine with my traditional way.

However, as I said, I understand and respect who use NixOS. I just don't share the same perspective and ideas. Hope it never breaks on you.

[fc417fc802]

You're allowed to throw debian testing or arch in a chroot. The only thing that doesn't work well for is gaming since it's possible for the mesa version to diverge too far.

[adornKey]

Currently Debian wants to deprecate GTK2. So even the guys that are interested in stability might start to see problems with Debian. The key problem of Linux is that it doesn't have a stable API to write long living GUI-software for. So far Debian was the way to go. Maybe recommending Debian will become even less popular soon.

[r_lee]

Debian has multiple editions, if you want Arch, go for sid/testing.

Stable is stable as in "must not be broken at all costs" kind of stable.

basically everything works just fine. there's occasionally a rare crash or gnome reset where you need to login again, but other than that not many problems.

[akdev1l]

No Debian is stable as in “it shall not change”.

There are times where there are known bugs in Debian which are purposely not fixed but instead documented and worked around. That’s part of the stability promise. The behaviour shall not change which sometimes includes “bug as a feature”

[happymellon]

Basically this.

https://xkcd.com/1172/

[horsawlarway]

Again, I like Debian a lot as a distro (much more than Ubuntu), but it's just not the same as a distro like Arch, even when you're on testing. Sid is close, but between Arch and sid... I've actually found fewer issues on Arch, and since there's an existing expectation that the community maintains and documents much of the software in AUR, there's almost always someone actually paying attention and updating things, rather than only getting around to it later.

It's not that Debian is a bad release, but it's the difference in a game on steam being completely unavailable for a few hours (Arch) or 10 days (Debian testing) due to an upstream issue.

I swapped a while back, mostly because I kept hitting issues that are accurately described and resolved by steps coming from Arch's community, even on distros like Debian and Fedora.

---

The power in debian is still that Ubuntu has made it very popular for folks doing commercial/closed source releases to provide a .deb by default. Won't always work... but at least they're targeting your distro (or almost always, ubuntu, but usually close enough).

Same for Fedora with the Redhat enterprise connections.

But I've generally found that the community in Arch is doing a better job at actually dogfooding, testing, and fixing the commercial software than most of the companies that release it... which is sad, but reality.

Arch has plenty of its own issues, but "Stale software" isn't the one to challenge it on. Much better giving it a pass due to arch/platform support limitations, security or stability needs, etc... All those are entirely valid critiques, and reasonable drivers for sticking to something like Debian.