this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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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?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] UsefulInfoPlz 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Nobody here for Mint? I’m a long time Ubuntu user but when i do my next upgrade it will be to mint.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

Both Ubuntu and mint are debian based.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 3 days ago

fedora is a good middle ground

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Debian Testing.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 3 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

It's not even a compromise really, it's very up to date and very stable.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 days ago (9 children)

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.

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[–] bruhduh 10 points 2 days ago
[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Fedora is a good middle ground, it's what Asahi Linux uses as its official distro

[–] Apalacrypto 5 points 2 days ago

Another upvote for Fedora. I tried SO many flavors over the years and every single one of them, while cool and neat up front eventually developed “something” that was too problematic.

So I asked for a recommendation with a very specific set of things that I needed from a distribution. Everybody told me to just stop messing around with different flavors and just go with plain old vanilla Fedora.

It has been rock solid and perfect in every way, and I no longer have that need to distrohop because I’m missing something.

[–] flubba86 4 points 3 days ago

+1 for Fedora. It is exactly what OP is asking for.

[–] spicystraw 17 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

To be 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!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Is there a good sort of middle ground distro between the reliability of Debian and the up-to-date packages of arch?

This guy:

(OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).
Or maybe Slowroll.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 days ago

I've found openSUSE tumbleweed to be the perfect mix between stable and constant updates. By default uses brtfs so if you break something the fix is a simple as rolling back to the snapshot that was automatically made right before the update

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

which Debian? Have you considered Debian testing or unstable?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Opensuse tumbleweed. The packages go through a testing process unlike Fedora AFAIK.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It was a kde update centre which is installed by default and suggests updates when they're available. But zypper was also failing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Ah okay, I'm not sure then.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 days ago

Fedora is generally pretty good

[–] [email protected] 26 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (6 children)

Absolutely. Here's three options

Fedora updates every, or around every, 3 months. This is very stable but very up to date.Most professional devs particularly ones working in Linux projects use it fornit's relative stability while having modern packages.

There's also PopOS! which is a rolling release, updating daily, but much more delayed than arch thus being much more usable.

Now for my favourite, OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Same style as PopOs but with a KDE, or gnome spin or of the box. A bit more sleek too. It also has YAST which is the best GUI based managment system on Linux.

I use arch (btw) but have a second duel booted tumbleweed install for work related stuff in order tonensure stability

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 days ago

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

another recomendation for Fedora from me

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's true. i do sometimes have issues with the ZFS package not compiling because of a too new kernel not being supported yet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Happy I switched to NixOS to solve this issue for myself

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 days ago

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Rolling release, but has QA on the weekly builds. It fits between Debian and Arch for sure.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

SuSE Slowroll. Not rolling release. Also not super-conservative like Debian is.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Note, that it is still in experimental state.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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).

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[–] Nibodhika 14 points 3 days ago (4 children)

What's wrong with Ubuntu/Mint/PopOS/Fedora or any of the distros usually recommended? They're easier to maintain and more up to date than Debian

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 days ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

Debian Testing has a lot more current packages, and is generally fairly stable. Debian Unstable is rolling release, and mostly a misnomer (but it is subject to massive changes at a moment's notice).

Fedora is like Debian Testing: a good middleground between current and stable.

I hear lots of good things about Nix, but I still haven't tried it. It seems to be the perfect blend of non-breaking and most up-to-date.

I'll just add to: don't believe everything you hear. Distrowars result in rhetoric that's way blown out of proportion. Arch isn't breaking down more often than a cybertruck, and Debian isn't so old that it yearns for the performance of Windows Vista.

Arch breaks, so does anything that tries to push updates at the drop of a hat; it's unlikely to brick your pc, and you'll just need to reconfigure some settings.

Debian is stable as its primary goal, this means the numbers don't look as big on paper; for that you should be playing cookie clicker, instead of micromanaging the worlds' most powerful web browser.

Try things out for yourself and see what fits, anyone who says otherwise is just trying to program you into joining their culture war

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago (5 children)

This may be an unpopular opinion, but NixOS. It has package up-to-dateness comparable to (and sometimes better than) Arch, but between being declarative (and reproducible) and allowing rollbacks, it's much harder to break. The cost is, of course, having to learn how to use NixOS, as it's a fair bit different to using a "normal" Linux distro.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

Debian and learn to use the nix package manager for your bleeding edge stuff

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago

Debian-Testing (Trixie) is the way to go. It's a rolling release, but it's very stable, because packages end up there after being tested in Sid (their unstable rolling release). Whatever makes it out of Trixie, ends up on the normal Debian. I've been running it since April without any breakages.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago

I would say:

  • Fedora if you like a point release, which means that every 6 months you do a big update of core stuff like the desktop environment, and on Fedora everything else is always generally up to date.
  • OpenSUSE Thumbleweed if you like a rolling release, which means that you don't do big updates, everything is kept to the last version that the software repository has, this is how arch works except in Thumbleweed the repositories are updated slower than in arch and less likely to break.

But you could also go for any more up to date debian-based distro, like Pop_OS or even Ubuntu, they might be easier for a newbie user. Fedora and OpenSUSE will be more up to date though.

If you do use Ubuntu, don't stick to just LTS versions, use the last version available (which right now happens to be an LTS version). The "extra support" it offers is not something desktop users care about, it's outweighted by the benefits of more updated software.

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