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If I need to spin up a VM on FreeBSD or on a Linux Distro I'll use Debian. it's a quick install and I know it'll work. that's it. that's all I use it for. I would never daily drive it.
I don't use Arch anymore but when I did I would maybe run -Syu every 2 to 3 weeks or so when I got bored.
I love my EndeavourOS. π
I did not expect a Linux outlet to post such an ignorant and outdated take. Disappointed π
The first time debian oldstable broke a package after an incremental update, i reconsidered my long running hard stance against arch
Updated my endeavour install last night from 6.18 to 7.1 without issue: daily -Syu is for the birds
I will roll into my grave
I use Debian on my homelab servers (Ubuntu when I have to for some reason) and Ubuntu LTS on desktop. And more or less ignore everything else outside of as a curiosity.
I use Debian at work, and need to do 3-5x the amount of troubleshooting than I need to do on my private Arch box. And I'm not doing anything crazy on either. I would even argue my work use cases are less crazy. I also don't think it's about the release model. I think the biggest differentiator is that Arch focuses on KISS, and stuff just keeps working.
Arch user (btw) here. I use xorg and a custom tiling window manager. I had 0 breakage regarding my config. Nvidie fked me 2 times and grub was broken 1 time. Thats it. 10 years 3 chroot. Pacman runs when I feel like it. I used two weeks to configure my setup, and I hardly ever change a thing nowdays.
Tried Hyperland on an "old" thinkpad, each update broke something. So no thanks, I'll stick to mature, battle tested components, where my config and sanity will remain stable, and leave the tamagotchi for ricers/thinkerers.
Stable over rolling release?
These are not mutually exclusive.
Can haz stable rolling.
E.g. use Gentoo, and avoid the ~ and ** keywords.
Gentoo's all about choice. You can choose to configure it so it does not require hand holding, and running it like a tamagochi. Or you can choose to fiddle with it so much it's very time demanding... not the compiling, so much as the system configuration management. There's official binhost now anyway. But then, if you're fiddling around alot, you'll send emerge to compile rather than just get a binary, to meet all your exacting nuances of configuration.
I have one gentoo that's been rock solid for ... about 17 years, with only one blip of downtime when there was a fire. No hand-holding.
Arch is indeed a different beast. In my experience, it's only a matter of (relatively short) time before Arch eats its kernel or some other catastrophe that requires rescue or abandon.
Respect to Manjaro for what they try do, offer arch with more stability (and conveniences).
On a whim, just now, I made this
But, then, I hear many things have changed in arch, since I last used arch (just before the switch to systemd).... and maybe things have changed, and it does not do that any more...?
::: spoiler ` And then also, can haz arch/artix/etc in a bedrock stratum... then it can carry on in its bloody rolling risky churn, in a safe space, where the more stable strata can pick up the slack when arch tries to faceplant itself again.
There's a lot of people posting their own stories about how their flavor "just works", which is great, but all just anecdotes. The reality is, statistically, anything that changes often is more likely to fail.
Any anything that changes barely is more often stuck with the bugs that still slip through for years.
If everyone understood the actual meaning of "stable" and that there are up- and downsides you have to weigh against each other, we would lose so many memes.
Went the other way, moved from Mint 22.3 to OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. Rolling release with solid testing before updates are pushed, any breakage during testing and they don't push that day's update, and if something does slip through and break things, just boot into the pre-update snapshot and wait a day to try again with the next patches.
Up to date packages with low hassle, so as long as I don't need stable-as-in-never-changes, it's great.
Also, nice to have KDE 6 finally and to have KDE not be a forgotten afterthought (Cinnamon is nice but I always feel like I'm limited compared to KDE)
Chaotic Neutral
distro breaks
reinstall
drag your backup back over
get back to work
Use whatever, you'll eventually break it either way.
I used to break my install quite often but it's been a while since I've done that
i'm glad all my gentoo comrades are in these comments
i was gonna comment "this is gentoo, actually", but i guess it's unneeded πΉ
Fedora here...I tried arch once...not for me.
I don't know where my Linux journey takes me next yet, but I only half way agree with this post. Arch is not quite as bad as this post makes it out to be, but there's definitely always a bit of russian roulette involved in whether your system boots tomorrow or not (most of the time it does).
I just had my EndeavourOS (which is just a thin layer on top of Arch) kill itself and some weird-ass hyperspecific flags in the initrd build process brought it back to life.
Tho in the ~10 years of using arch now I'd say it was still preferable to the extremely stable experience, and I don't think recommending Debian Stable is such a good idea either.
Yeah I could unfuck my EOS system with a bit of trickery, but once you get a good franken debian going, when that thing breaks there's no rescue.
I've had some stuff on Arch break after an upgrade too because some config variable names changed. I rember when I had KDE with i3 going and one day the desktop was gone. Was just because the variable names in KDE had changed and a quick i3 config change was all that was needed.
Having to selectively install packages from other sources because the main repo will keep you on a too outdated version for 6 months is just not a viable idea in today's world.
There are luckily more than just these 2 options.
but once you get a good franken debian going, when that thing breaks thereβs no rescue.
I found that since Flatpak and Docker became a thing, there's really not much reason to do frankendebian nowadays. My desktop runs Debian oldstable and it's just fine.
My job is doing sales engineering for an open source DB company and just last week I encountered a prospect running on Arch.
They also did backups to an external drive they kept in a safe.
fedora on main and debian on home server
it just works
That is why I use openSUSE Tumbleweed. Haven't updated in half a year? No problem, just do zypper dup and let it do its job.