this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Which Debian branch to use (self.linux)
submitted 1 year ago by ladyanita22 to c/linux
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Hi all,

I'm currently a happy Fedora user, but I'm attracted to the Debian world because of the sane choices Debian has mostly always taken. It's a phenomenal distro, with a lot of support (both internla and from 3rd parties), and that follows some of the principles I care about. It has a long support period, it's less opinionated than other distros, has a huge ecosystem and it's community-run. Also, it's an excellent distro for almost all use-cases: IoT, Server and Workstation.

I love Fedora, but it's not exactly an LTS release, so I have to jump ship to CentOS whenever I need something more stable. Not that I dislike that heavily, though, but I'd like to try the Debian world.

I am not opting for Ubuntu because the snapization of the distro, which is becoming more dependent on snaps as time passes. I like some stuff about PopOS, but some other stuff I don't. If I were to choose vanilla Debian, which one should I pick to be the most similar to Fedora?

  • Stable
  • Testing
  • Unstable (Sid)

I've read that Stable = CentOS, Testing = Fedora, Unstable = Rawhide/Arch. However, during the freeze period, neither Testing nor Unstable will actually behave like that at all. How long is that freeze period and how much of a big deal is it?

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[–] mo_ztt 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Freeze is a fairly exceptional time unless something goes wrong; most of the the time it's:

  • Stable if you're running a server, something boring and important where security is paramount and it's okay for the software to be kind of old
  • Testing for daily use (personal machines etc)
  • Unstable / sid is also fine for daily use most of the time, although once in a blue moon something important might break. It mostly behaves like testing; the only reason you would choose unstable is if you're actively developing for Debian or else if it's so important to you to have extremely up-to-date software that you can accept some brokenness.

I recommend testing for normal machines and stable for servers.

[–] ladyanita22 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

That's a clear answer, thanks! How long does the freeze period last? 6 months prior de next big release?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The freeze cycle normally lasts 6-8 months. (Edit: It has multiple stages, some of which might not affect you at all.)

One thing to be aware of if you choose Testing or Unstable: They're generally not covered by the Debian Security Team, so security fixes might not arrive as consistently as with Stable.

You could always just start with Stable and plan to migrate to Testing or Unstable if you ever have a need. Stable + Backports is a good middle ground for some people.

[–] TunaCowboy 1 points 1 year ago

You can integrate debsecan with apt and pull security updates from experimental and unstable as demonstrated here, linked and recommended here.

[–] mo_ztt 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The hope for freeze is 6 months, yes... but not all of that is "hard freeze". Some portion of that time just refers to freezing the toolchain and other essential internals, so in practice you're usually looking at maybe like 3-4 months where your most up-to-date software is being limited to being no newer than 3-4 months old. Which is, in almost all situations... fine 🙂.

[–] ladyanita22 1 points 1 year ago

I see. In case of issues with new hardware, one can always pick Mesa/the Kernel from Experimental. That's the beauty of APT, you can mix different branches.

[–] GustavoM 1 points 1 year ago

If you are not planning to update your distro for the next few months neither on using it for all the day long, visiting weird/suspicious sites and the like... then you can pick any "branch" you want, even unstable/sid.

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

What level of Linux user do you consider yourself to be? I dunno, I guess if you are attracted to the Debian way of doing things, check out Linux Mint Debian Edition. If you want more control over your system and consider yourself intermediate to advanced, go with Arch. I finally settled on Arch and as long as they keep doing good work, I am going to stay with it.