ITT - “I DISAGREE WITH THE FACTUAL ACCURACY OF THE SETUP AND/OR PUNCHLINE OF YOUR JOKE.”
I’ll never stop hating that debian is labeled stable. I’m fully aware that they are using the definition of stable that simply means not updating constantly but the problem is that people conflate that with stability as in unbreaking. Except it’s the exact opposite in my experience, I’ve had apt absolutely obliterate debian systems way too often. Vs pacman on arxh seems to be exceptionally good at avoiding that. Sure the updated package itself could potentially have a bug or cause a problem but I can’t think of any instance where the actual process of updating itself is what eviscerated the system like with apt and dpkg.
And even in the event of an update going catastrophically wrong to the point that the system is inoperable I can simply chroot in use a statically built binary pacman and in a oneliner command reinstall ALL native packages in one go which I’ve never had not fix a borked system from interrupted update or needing a rollback
FWIW I’ve got a Debian server that hosts most of my sites and primary DNS server, that’s been running since Etch (4.0, 2007ish). I’ve upgraded it over the years, switched from a dedicated server to OpenVZ to KVM, and it’s still running today on Bookworm. No major issues with upgrades.
You are maybe conflating stability with convenience.
“Why is this stable version of my OS unstable when I update and or install new packages…”
The entire OS falling down randomly on every distribution during normal OS background operations was always an issue or worry, and old Debbie Stables was meant to help make linux feel reliable for production server use, and it has done a decent job at it.
I mean when I can take an Arch Linux installation that I forgot about on my server and is now 8 years out of date and simply manually update the key ring and then be up to date without any issue but every time I’ve ever tried to do many multiple major version jumps on debian it’s died horrifically… I would personally call the latter less stable. Or at least less robust lol.
I genuinely think that because Arch Linux is a rolling distribution that it’s update process is just somehow more thorough and less likely to explode.
The last one with debian was a buster to bookworm jump. Midway through something went horrifically wrong and dpkg just bailed out. The only problem was that it somehow during all of that removed the entirety of every binary in /bin. Leaving the system completely inoperable and I attempted to Google for a similar solution as arch. Where i could chroot in and fix it with one simple line. But so far as I was able to find there is no such option with apt/dpkg. If I wanted to attempt to recover the system it would have been an entirely manual Endeavor with a lot of pain.
I would also personally label having the tools to recover from catastrophic failure as being an important part of stability especially when people advocate for things like Debian in a server critical environment and actively discourage the use of things like Arch
If the only thing granting at the title of stability is the lack of update frequency that can simply be recreated on Arch Linux by just not updating frequentlyಠ_ಠ
Good point! But I recently swapped to Debian 12 from Fedora 41. The latter needing constant updates several times a day. And despite this, it was not stable at all.
Fedora is good on laptops since it has the very newest kernel and thus includes all the latest driver fixes (which are needed for laptops like the Framework where they’re actively improving things). On the other hand, it has the very newest kernel and thus includes all the latest bugs.
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From my experience of Fedora: would you like to update today? Debian: You’re good bro, no updates today.
I think I’ve put fedora on at least 4 personal systems and it has never caused an issue. It’s so smooth it’s boring in the best way. Switched to it for daily computing about 4 years ago. I use a minipc as a media server with Arch and turning it on it’s exciting. Just this fucking morning the default configuration decided that my main audio device was a microphone. Lovely. So flexible.
Ha. You want STABLE, use NixOS.
If you’re cannot parse the configuration file, you don’t update. It is perfectly, 100% stable, about 60% of the time (when I change my config file without an error).
Mint: easy
Mint: come for the ease of installation and use, stay because it’s just Ubuntu and Debian under the hood so it has tons of support, and the terminal is right there if you need to out so some real shit.
I think mine doesn’t roll off the tongue in quite the same way.
More accurate i would describe Fedora is:
Adopting Modern features first(Wayland,pipewire,etc Like there is no x mode in most stable Wayland desktops) and only having free and open source Repos(Rpmfusion can be added but its not official and excludes the Kernel drivers).I think, a more serious attempt to summarize openSUSE would probably be: Functionality
Debian, Arch, Fedora and such are all weirdly similar in that they focus so much on minimalism. For example, Debian uses
dashas the default shell, which breaks TTYs, but possibly squeezes out a tiny bit of performance, so I guess, that’s worth it…?Debian only uses dash for the system shell, and it does improve performance a bit given how many shell scripts run on a typical Linux system. Interactive shell is still set to Bash by default.
I would hope the Fedora isn’t the only one that cares about security
there are many distros with even better or similiar security as fedora. The least secure ones are Ubuntu and distros based on it, and Debian stable. Even less secure are any inactive distro. But in general, most distros can be hardened, some more, some less. Like i can harden my Android phone similiar to Arch’s level. (yes, i also use custom kernel on my phone, the most secure one for my device)
Debian? Insecure? It’s only as insecure as you make it. The default minimal installation from the netinstall CD has barely anything running - not even SSH unless you explicitly select it during installation.
Why do you think ubuntu and debian derivatives are unsecure?
It’s because there are cases where non security related bugs end up being security bugs after all.
Nixos: everything everywhere all at once
I’m still a Linux noob all things considered, and I’ve been using NixOS for six months or more.
It is HARD, but I see the true value of it. I will never need to reinstall Linux because I broke it, that’s simply impossible.
If I ever need to migrate my system, it’s all backed up to github. With a single
Bash update.shevery single .config file backed up, system upgraded, all packages updated.
I just love Nix, it’s the perfect OS for me.
Now I just need to learn how to use flakes…
Sidebar: I’ve never asked before, but maybe someone can help me out. If I install a flake of an application, am I supposed to add it to the existing flake, or can I modulate flakes?
I’ve noticed when installing the nixvim flake it generates a new flake and it runs when I issue the
nix run ~/.dotfiles/nixvim/flake.nixcommand, but I don’t want to have to run that command every time. I feel like making a fish abbreviation isn’t the correct way of doing this.
Good for you there wasn’t an “ease of use” or “intuitive” field.
nixOS is for people who love config files
you don’t even need to know where, you don’t even need to know when. that’s how every it gets
NixOS is from Max Verstappen country not Sebastian Vettel country
for security, use Tails, Qubes, Whonix, or if you want gaming + security, then Bazzite or Garuda
You’re confusing security with privacy. While distros you mentioned are great for preventing ISPs and governments from spying on you (privacy), they’re not really any better at preventing hackers from exploiting your vulnerable web server than fedora (security).
While distros you mentioned are great for preventing ISPs and governments from spying on you (privacy),
How do they do that?
no, Qubes, Bazzite, Garuda were made with security in mind. Containerization, selinux enforcing, hash checks, address space layout randomization is also built in. These are all more secure than Fedora. Qubes for example, uses vm containers to completly isolate every app, so the system is almost impossible to compromise by malware or hacking. Bazzite uses immutable root file system, much like stock android. it may not along well with unix philosophies, but there isn’t really a way for a malicious code to run with elevated privilages or to manipulate system files. Garuda automatically creates snapshota from the system, so if it is compromised, it can be rolled back quickly. Snapshots for external devices or cloud are supported as well. It uses zram compression on swap, this helps avoid data leakages to the disk, so makes sure that after a reboot, every session quits, since data from ram can’t leak on the disk. it also uses firejail and chaotic aur sandboxing. There is a smaller support for secure boot too. So these are all highly secure operating systems. And to some degree, privacy and security overlap each other.
Yeah my bad, you’re right. I got too stuck on tails, which is in my opinion more focused on privacy than security, and ignored everything else.
When you run OpenSUSE, you can feel it was made by Germans.
The installer is a beautiful example of German engineering.
The package manager is a perfect example of German over-engineering.
If you run it with KDE, you have 2 redundant GUI admin tools for every config in the system, and 4 for setting up printers.German engineering.
I can hear this gif. I guess it’s time to have my colonoscopy.
Thank you for the nostalgia
Yeah that sounds like a typical BMW engine layout.
It’s amazing how OpenSUSE got my laptop’s valve covers to leak oil.
As the owner of many old German cars this is funny but only because it means no one read the technical manual that came with the car
As the former owner of an E36 and then an E90 I can tell you that the more modern ones still piss oil just as badly. And the consequences can be much worse (read: expensive) to boot.
Flexibility translates to unpredictable.
I’ve never had any issues with my Arch install being unpredictable. It has always worked exactly as I expected it to, even though I update it every couple of days.
It has always worked exactly as I expected it to
Just expect it to break, then it will behave as expected taps head
Well I set up automated timeshift on btrfs, so maybe that’s why it’s playing nice.
I’ve been using Arch since 2014. If I could be arsed, I could write you a looooooooong list of regressions I’ve had to deal with over the years. For an experienced Linux user, they’re usually fairly easy to deal with, but saying you never have to deal with anything is just a lie.
My experience with Arch is basically: it’s all very predictable until it isn’t and you suddenly find yourself troubleshooting something random like unexplainable bluetooth disconnects caused by a firmware or kernel update.
What you’ve said is true, though it’s a bit of a trade-off – over the years I’ve wasted so many hours with those “user friendly” distros because I need a newer version of a dependency, or I need to install something that isn’t in the repos. Worst case I have to figure out how to compile it myself.
It’s very rare to find something that isn’t in the Arch official repos or the AUR. Personally I’ve found that being on the bleeding edge tends to save me time in the long run, as there’s almost no barriers to getting the packages that I need.
What you’ve said is true, though it’s a bit of a trade-off
Yes, and that’s why after more than 10 years I still use Arch. I like having the latest version of things and I’m confident enough in my abilities that I know that if something breaks I can always either find a fix, or at least identify the offending package, hold it back, report the bug and wait for the issue to be resolved.
There are times where it can be trying though. The first plasma 6 releases for example were rough. More recently, I’ve also been having issues with 6.11 and 6.12 kernels and my ax200 wifi that I only recently found a fix to. My wifi would freeze whenever I started streaming video from the PC to my TV, but only in kernels after 6.11. Turning off TCP segmentation offloading with ethtool resolved it (
ethtool -K wlan0 tso off). You don’t want to know how long I had been pulling my hair out at that issue until I found the fix.
Did you consider that the problems you have might not be problems that other people experience? I very highly doubt our two systems are at all similar. Your experience is just that, yours, and so you don’t have any right to be arbitor over whether or not I’m lying.
That’s such a cop-out answer and totally missing the point. I’ve run Arch on 4 different systems, and yes I had different issues on each and sometimes issues that hit across the board.
At the end of the day, whether or not this was just my personal experience doesn’t matter. What matters is that the issues were always caused by what Arch is: a unstable rolling release distro that pushes out the latest version of upstream packages, bugs and all. Sooner or later some will hit you, telling yourself and other people otherwise is deluding yourself and those people.
Yeah, and sooner or later, I’ll die of old age, or cancer, or an accident, or get audited on my taxes.
None of those things have happened yet either. Not only that, but the same is true for every operating system that has ever existed, or will ever exist, including every distro of Linux.
Here’s the thing: your answer is both invalidating and ignorant, and it shows a lack of understanding of what differentiates Arch from a stable distro.
- My wifi, that had been working fine since I installed this computer in 2020, broke in kernel 6.11 and 6.12 because Arch pushed those updates.
- Early plasma 6.0 releases were rough as balls for months, because Arch pushed those updates.
- My bluetooth, that had been working since I installed this computer in 2020, started to randomly disconnect sometime last year due to buggy firmware updates because Arch pushed those updates.
- Hell even plain old intel ethernet on my old system from 2014 suddenly started hanging up under load a year or two ago (never found the cause, did find a workaround).
None of these issues were a fault of my own, all I did was
pacman -Syu, and none of this would happen on a stable distro. I’m not saying Arch is shit because of this, I’m saying: beware of what you are getting into when you choose Arch: for every single package on your system, you are effectively at the mercy of whatever “upstream” decides to shit out that week. Being delusional about that fact and having guys come crawling out of the woodworks everytime this is mentioned, saying platitudes like: “I nEvEr HaD aN iSsUe” doesn’t help anyone.Yeah, neither does “eVeRyOnE wIlL hAvE pRoBlEmS”. Kinda a stupid thing to say, all things considered.
Do you use your computer for things that rely on specific library versions and functionality?
imagine if you update it after 2 weeks. Arch is okay, if you keep backups. otherwise, you are basically playing a russian roulette
I don’t like waiting that long, because sitting for an hour while it recompiles everything that updated is annoying. I like the daily or so updates that only take a couple minutes.
What? I love Arch, it’s so god damn stable and fast.
absolutely not. look at nixos.
Once i get another machine to dick around on ill try installing arch.
i started learning about linux 4 months ago. Installed Arch with archinstall pretty easily to a VM, it booted up no problem. But you have to manually install the desktop, if you want a gui (who doesn’t lol). But there are many desktops for Arch, the most common ones have pretty good documentation. But if i were you, i’d experiment with some more niche desktop emviroments
I haved used many distros and DEs. my favorites are keyboard driven like i3 and such. For now i use fedora because i needed something to work out of the box. I would like to stay in the terminal.
i tried lxqt and gnome. those were disappointments. And i used kde and cinnamon too, those are good
Nice i like lxqt but dont use it currently
Just use kvm/qemu and install it. When I want to play with detailed setups I install slackware and start configuring/compiling.
yeah i could do that. When i installed it i had a problem booting logging in, it wouldn’t goto the DE.
