They say debian is free and has its promise, but Arch has like 2-4 maintainers?
try one for a week, switch to the other for a week, and if you feel like it, switch to any other whenever you want
I’m honestly not sure if I’m witnessing the most autistic responses to the most obvious shitpost ever, or if the AI bots got into Lemmy already.
Why wouldn’t we? Lemmy has at least 12 real people.
I’m a real people, and I’m livid that I shouldn’t respond with a paragraph about Mint because this is obvious shitposting.
That’s right, you are a real people! You can tell you’re real because your eyes are real eyes.emoji . This was first discovered by the early 21st century philosopher — jayden smith.
So are you, Bruce. You’re also real, and don’t need to dress up in a rubber suit for attention. You’re good enough.
Plan9
Just get Cachyos its what I use and is super easy and based on Arch
I highly recommend Mint Cinnamon, especially if this is your first foray into Linux.
Two extremes here. Debian is slow to update while arch is bleeding edge.
I avoid containerized desktop apps (snap, flatpak) so I couldn’t run Debian as a daily driver. You’d want to use the latest FireFox and their repo’s release is old. You you can get it from flatpak, but I don’t want to do that. Running on recent (<1y) hardware will also be problematic. I guess you could keep on adding 3rd party repos to your install, though some post from debian forums always stuck with me: “Debian is only what is released + whats in the official repo. Install anything else and you’re not running debian anymore.”. Its a whacky OS and I love it, but daily drive it only on my server.
Arch puts everything on their repo straight away. And if its not there, you’re downloading code from AUR and building it yourself. I actually appreciate this since it complies with the philosophy that you can’t really trust your applications unless you read the source and build it yourself. Awesome, but the general public shouldn’t be doing this… I don’t mind applications being distributed in binary form. I am able to trust linux community maintained repositories. Arch is for the geeks imo.
I found Fedora to be a good middle ground, since it gets package updates straight away while still maintaining fixed OS releases. No need for snap or flatpaks since their repo has everything and is updated. Its also widely supported by software vendors (just like debian). Id go with it as a recommendation, but still note that its philosophy is free software only and this can potentially mean tinkering with additional stuff from RPM fusion, especially if you dance with nvidia and watch videos encoded with non free codecs.
It takes a bit of time to find the right distro and that is the biggest obstacle to linux imo.
I avoid containerized desktop apps (snap, flatpak) so I couldn’t run Debian as a daily driver.
Wat? this is the dumbest take of the day.
Feel free to chose either one, but avoiding Debian for this reason is just plain wrong.
It takes a bit of time to find the right distro and that is the biggest obstacle to linux imo.
It’s also the greatest benefit. Vanilla stuff works out of the box for most, but once you need more, there’s a paved runway headed in any direction you want to go (some in better shape than others to be fair).
Windows and OS X are certainly wider runways, but there are cliffs off the side of you want to change direction.
Good things usually take time, but you will know where you are when you get there.
Can have fast Debian with ceres [1] ~ er, I mean with sid. And experimental staging area even beyond that.
Can have slower more stable (~?) arch with manjaro.
While neither are gentoo, they (/ the community) have availed at least that much choice.
[1: that’s Devuan’s]
PS, speaking of
Its a whacky OS and I love it
look at this old wacky thing I love (and have been daily driving since).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuYMBCcgs98
Gets around those quandries of having to pick which one, like between bleeding edge rolling and LTS stable, or between arch and debian, or whatever other pair of otherwise seemingly mutually exclusive criteria that otherwise seem inescapable from compromise. Nope. No quandry. Can haz both. ;)
Shshsh. ;) Linux’s best kept secret. Hehe.
Out of curiosity, why avoid Flatpak? I get snap or AppImage, but Flatpak is generally great.
Not parent poster, but this is a detailed explanation for the big ideas.
Wow, thanks for the link! I’m a huge Flatpak fan and always thought they were awesome. I still do, but a lot of the issues in that blog were news to me. Thanks for sharing, it was a really good read!
why avoid Flatpak? I get snap or AppImage,
Objectively, they all frustrate validation the same. When comparing with a SLSA3-compliant setup where every installed artifact has a signed checksum in a signed bundle from a signed resource on a signed repository, and the endpoint to this is readily available from something like authenticated SNMP into the single source of truth, they all tends to compare poorly.
The chart below completely ignores that Debs are consolidated into a single source of truth as well, and I feel violating SSoT should cost significantly because of dependency holes when artifact registry is incomplete, but SLSA doesn’t care about that part.
Ecosystem / Format Estimated SLSA Level Update Reliability / Model Trust Chain & Provenance Comments (withheld) 3–4 Very high; repo-based, transactional updates Strong: signed packages + signed repo metadata + central DB; distros enforce reproducible builds. OCI containers (hardened pipeline: cosign + Tekton/in-toto) 3 High if using automated CI/CD and policy enforcement Strong if you use signed images + non-falsifiable provenance; this is rare but achievable. DEB (distro repos) 2 High; repo-based, APT handles dependencies Medium: repo metadata signed, but per-package signatures not mandatory; weaker checksum chain. Flatpak runtimes (Flathub) 2 High; centralized runtimes, predictable updates Medium: signed OSTree commits; build infra more centralized, but not full end-to-end provenance. Flatpak apps 1–2 High; repo-based, automatic updates Mixed: OSTree signing helps, but build provenance varies by publisher; no uniform SLSA guarantees. Snap (strict confinement) 1–2 High; centralized store, auto-updates Centralized signing by Canonical, but opaque build pipelines; trust is “trust the store operator.” OCI containers (typical public images) 0–1 Medium; pull-latest model, tag drift common Usually unsigned; mutable tags; no guaranteed provenance—trust is mostly social and reputation-based. Snap (classic confinement) 1 High; same store/auto-update model Same store trust, but classic snaps bypass sandbox; even more reliance on publisher integrity. AppImage 0–1 Low–medium; ad-hoc self-update or manual downloads Almost no chain of custody; signatures optional; no central repo or provenance expectations. npm (JavaScript) 0–1 High frequency, but low reliability of safety; semver + lockfiles Registry accounts can publish arbitrary tarballs; no default signed provenance; transitive deps explode risk. PyPI / pip (Python) 0–1 Similar to npm; pip + requirements/lockfiles Tarballs/wheels from arbitrary maintainers; no mandatory signing; provenance work (e.g., PEP 740) is emerging but not standard. Composer / Packagist (PHP) 0–1 Good tooling, but same “trust the registry” model Packages pulled from Packagist/VCS; no mandatory signatures; dependency graph trust is social, not cryptographic. CPAN (Perl) 0–1 Mature ecosystem, but manual/legacy in many flows Historically minimal provenance; mirrors and authors are trusted by convention, not by SLSA-style attestations. Other language registries (RubyGems, crates.io, etc.) 0–1 Similar to npm/PyPI; lockfiles help reproducibility Central registries, but no default SLSA provenance; integrity is mostly TLS + registry operator trust. Man, I really need to check out “(withheld)”
Seriously though, nice table!
the table reads like AI output
Not OP, but this is a fantastic answer, and I wish I’d read it before installing Deb on my wife and friend’s computers!
I use CachyOS, but decided “bleeding edge” would be more of a nuisance than help for them, so opted for “very stable”, then immediately ran into challenges trying to get apps, and needed to get containerized apps for everything. I should have gone with something Fedora-based or just stuck with what I know, CachyOS.
what apps did you need to install containerized?
Stremio was the big one, but maybe I just didn’t try hard enough.
Getting Wine/Bottles working with a niche work remote desktop streaming app was a huge pain, too, while in CachyOS it’s 1-click to get it all set up from the Hello app.
On my CachyOS desktop, I use Docker images for a couple things: my mesh wifi network controller server (Omada) and for ripping Kindle books to .epub with a specific Windows setup that still works (I need to read with TTS and Kindle broke native Android TTS when they implemented their own shitty TTS option, so I .epub everything.)
I don’t think I use any other containerized apps, aside from my work Windows VM (which is only required for SharePoint integration in Explorer.)
Stremio has a native Debian package right on it’s download page.
And as to all the other stuff, that is super specific and is hardly a reason to not recommend debian to a random person.
I’ve been a Debian guy for a long time for one reason, stability. I don’t game a lot, but haven’t had an issue in years, my son uses arch and games way more than I do, but he also has to fix a lot more stuff that updates seem to break.
If you are under 30 I almost want to encourage Arch as you’ll be forced to learn a bit more over time and learning is never a bad thing. If you might game some, but value a rock solid system, go Debian.
Teach good debugging practices early
Yup. I’m late to this. My first rubber duck ordered days ago, due for delivery.
Take debian & if you are into headaches take Arch
As any fule kno, the true answer to this is Haiku. Particularly as it’s now officially* supported on M-series Macs.
_
"As any fool know?
Sorry if that’s obvious.
Meh, not relevant.
I did actually misspell it, but it’s a reference to Nigel Molesworth.
If you want your system to be reliable, stable and in essence boring: Debian.
If you want to be hands-on, on the bleeding edge and updating daily: Arch.
Debian user that reccomends it. I don’t game or need latest gizmos. I want and have a computer that is very reliable and maintenance free.
Debian Unstable, if you like to live dangerously and have to reboot every couple of years.
/s
I like that even without the “/s”
Much depends on what you want out of life. Your choices are about as far apart in philosophy as you can get.
Do you wear tweed or have a sport coat with elbow patches? If so, then Debian is as staid and stable as you are. Slowly evolving and the mother of many other distros. Or do you have dyed hair and piercings? Do you live in your mother’s basement? Arch might be a great fit for you. Arch is often wild and barely house broken and will pee on your floor as soon as it can. It can be tamed if kept under tight control. But it’s a wild ride on the edge if you let it.
There is a middle ground that can draw from both worlds. Ubuntu and Fedora and SuSe are that middle ground. If this is your first time sailing the Sea of Distros, then somewhere in this middle is perhaps the best place to start.
I feel like there are other options here. Fedora? OpenSUSE?
And a few more yet
Fedora is so, so nice. I have it on all my personal computers.
At my work they only tolerate Ubuntu. My God, it can be so frustrating. Snap gets in the way constantly. Somehow Ubuntu LTS seems to have a knack for precisely choosing the worst package versions for a workstation.
Fedora on the other hand just gets out of my way and lets me get shit done.
I am obligated to recommend Alamalinux at any and all opportunity
This
