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?
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.
I have a gentoo desktop but for a convenient middle ground just put Debian on my laptop. It’s stable, things just work out of the box, maintainers/devs are competent, they haven’t drunk the snap/flatpack kool-aid…
Switching to Testing is always an option but I’ve not found the need to do that yet when I can install programs from a deb package or just compile from source and install it in ~/.bin in my home directory.
To ne honest PopOS is great. Frequent updates, good (subjective) design and ui choices, just works. If it fits your vibe I would say it is a good balance!
I’m running PopOS on a computer for wathing media at home. I’m not too impressed. I read a bunch of comment threads recommening it so I treid it out. They seem a bit unstable – that at least falls in OP middle ground. I made an update and dpms management was just different, like the screen is no longer turning itself off. I’ve had some thing like this happen on it. It’s not breakage, it’s a bit annoying. “Just works”? Eh, sure, kinda’.
Sorry to hear that, milage varies depending on hardware, I suppose. I have had it running on a Lenovo laptop for over a year without issues. Hope you find good distro fitting your needs and hardware specs out of the box!
It also has the benefit of being able to apply the vast majority of Ubuntu tutorials, etc. since it’s based on it. Plus it doesn’t force you to use snaps for everything.
My server has been on Endeavour OS (arch with a gui installer) for at least 18 months. I run updates roughly every 10 days (basically whenever I remember). Never had a problem with it. I dare say it could go horribly wrong at some point so I keep the LTS kernel installed as well just as a fall back.
My main pc is also running Endeavour OS (dual boot with windows 11). Other than having to keep Bluetooth downgraded to support the ps5 dual sense controller, it runs great.
My only gripe is that updates often contain something that forces the kernel rebuild process and so it needs a reboot afterwards.
Every other Linux I’ve run has had some sort of “rebuild to fix” type issue at some point, or had been hard to find good support information for. Endeavour OS has been the most reliable and the easiest to fix and find support for.
Fedora is generally pretty good
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Rolling release, but has QA on the weekly builds. It fits between Debian and Arch for sure.
Garuda. It’s an Arch derivative that creates a snapshot of your system every time you update. That way, if the update breaks something, you can just roll your system back to the last working snapshot.
Fedora, Ubuntu etc. use up to date packages if you’re using flatpaks and snaps. Nix I suppose fits the bill better but it’s a harder distro to “learn” than arch imo
How about Rhino? Rolling release of Debian Sid iirc
Debian Stable isn’t the only way to run Debian though people often act like it. That said, if you want the stability of Debian Stable then run it with the nix package manager (nix-bin).
Or with Flatpak!
fedora is a good middle ground
Debian and learn to use the nix package manager for your bleeding edge stuff
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.
OpenSUSE tumbleweed is a good compromise IMO. it is also a rolling release distro with built in snapshotting. So if anything does go wrong it takes ~5 mins to roll back to the last good snapshot. You can set the same thing up on arch but it isn’t ootb and YAST is a great management tool as well.
I would say Tumblewees is better than traditional Fedora.
But the lack of desktops, variants, adoption, as well as the lack of being able to reset a system, makes it less stable than Fedora Atomic Desktops.
Resetting is huge. You can revert to a bit-by-bit copy of the current upstream.
It is not complete at all, but already works as a daily driver. uBlue deals with almost all the edges that are left.
Tbh my main gripe with Tumbleweed is the package manager as someone who likes to use the CLI, the weird naming convention, renames, etc are annoying. Also found some minor annoyances that all put together made me choose Fedora over Tumbleweed. I can see why some people would like it tho.
You can use dnf on OpenSuse, and it actually uses the correct
/etc/dnf.repos.d!zyppers UI is horrible, no idea at what internet speed those animations make sense, not on an even 2,4GHz wifi.
I used QGis as a Fedora Distrobox didnt install the language package, because it installs only the one from the OS. on Tumbleweed all languages were always installed, but it had some issue where no plugins worked or something.
Same with RStudio, which works creat with iucar/cran COPR and the R-CoprManager app that makes it use dnf underneath.
Rstudio should absolutely install them as libs though, into /var/lib. Then the Flatpak could be made working too I guess.
but then why use OpenSUSE instead of just Fedora?
Because they have Slowroll and working, automatic BTRFS snapshots.
I have no idea what dnf Fedora is doing, using BTRFS but no snapshots.
I think fedora does have some automatic snapshots, just not as much as OpenSUSE. Still tho, why not setup better snapshots on Fedora rather than switch package manager and repos altogether on openSUSE?
I found zypper package speed for download seems to vary a lot, sometimes superfast and other times it drips in like old dialup. Maybe server load or what default server it hits is too many hops away or something. It also does delta doownloads, ehich makes sense if your data is capped, but takes a lot longer to negotiate the lookup for update, compare versions, and pull delta only.
Good thing about zypper and SUSE setup is you can use the various patch, oatches list patches commands to see what is unneeded, recommended or critical, CVE, and if has already been applied to your system or not. Great tool for sysadmin
Yes I would love to have mail notifications etc for security updates.
Currently setting up a server, CentOS installer didnt boot so my lazy ass just rebased to securecore (Fedora IoT -> uBlue uCore -> secureblue) which is very nice but rolling.
With LUKS encryption, which I want and need, this is problematic, as I need to manually type the password afaik. TPM unlock didnt work even though I have a Nitrokey with a TPM integrated afaik.
I am not 100% sure, but I had something similar with passworded drive. There was a way to edit crypt tab stuff so that when system looks for pwd input on boot it went to the hashed file to get password. I forget the steps I did, but online there is a walk through and it was not too difficult to configure…just a few manual file edits
Debian Testing.
