Two years into full-time Linux and I’m finally burning the distro-hopping cycle. I fell for the Arch/AUR trap for a while, but I got tired of spending my weekends debugging file manager crashes instead of maintaining my home lab.
Switched back to Fedora, and it’s boring in exactly the way I need it to be. It’s a stable launchpad for my projects, not the project itself.
Debian for everything.
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Yes ! I don’t get why debian always seems to be forgotten outside of its server use. I have been running it for 2 years now (homelab, laptop and desktop).
Nah, not even for servers. SLSA and ISO27002. Validation in the other distros is better, and that’s night-and-day for server sector.
I worked Unix in 99-06 and there’s a reason their Linux offering wasn’t debian: that validation hole.
Beyond none of its branches actually satisfying my preferences, I feel like the way it handles major version upgrades is way too involved. I suppose it makes sense; it’s paying back the accumulated debt of a couple years worth of bliss…
Having said that, my experience on Fedora Atomic is (almost) equally blissful without requiring any of that whenever a major version update strikes.
Don’t get me wrong; I definitely do believe Debian has its uses on desktop Linux. But I can’t shake off the feeling that they’re definitely more niche compared to say Fedora.
The upgrade issue is exactly why I don’t like Debian-based distros for my desktop
I love Debian, I use it as a desktop and it’s installed on all my machines, but it has some problems/quirks that make it hard to recommend it for desktop usage.
First one is that it doesn’t have sensible defaults, the OS expects a user who is an admin, one who will configure things to their liking. I would consider this to be a feature, if it weren’t for the second problem, the documentation. The documentation is wayy too dated, lots of pages in the wiki haven’t been updated since Debian Buster days!
A better recommendation would be probably a Debian derivative like MX Linux. They are more opinionated, but as far as I know, they come with better defaults and offer newer guides, documentation, etc.
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Debian is nice & boring, but I have had issues with how old its kernel and software versions are. 6.12 isn’t too bad for Trixie, but previously it was really terrible. When I was running Bookworm, I ran into plenty of situations where software I was compiling or getting from outside the repos (for niche software), wasn’t backwards compatible to the library versions Debian provided.
No hate for Debian, but it just doesn’t work for a lot of people. However, these days I would go for Debian over Ubuntu 10 times out of 10.
That is a release engineering issue on the developers side in my opinion though no less real. Developers targeting Linux should target the current version of big LTS releases like debian and Redhat enterprise if they are serious about compatibility beyond “works on my system”
For the vast majority of computer users I’d says debian is fine since most users hardly step out of the browser these days.
Staying compatible with LTS releases should absolutely be the goal, but that takes work from both sides.
If Debian is applying backported patches to old software (I think the oldest version I saw was 6 years out of support) that generates a nightmare to support for package maintainers. If there are features which are not supported since the version is so old, but there are backported security patches which change the API, the developers would essentially have to maintain a specific version for each LTS distro’s specific set of patches, and the number of versions you have to maintain and the length of time you need to maintain them for quickly becomes impossible to manage.
Stable is nice, but you can have stability without being criminally outdated, as Trixie shows. The ideal is to have a stable and up to date distribution.
And yes, most users would be fine due to just being in the browser, but thats true of literally any OS or distro, not specific to this.
I don’t think back ported security patches should be changing public APIs, are you speaking from actual experience or is that some kind of theoretical problem that might not actually exist or at least isn’t the norm?
Debian for everything I need to not fall over, CachyOS for computers I want to fiddle with.
If you like to fiddle, I might suggest Arch. 😁 Hit me up if you want help with getting started!
CachyOS is Arch with a few tweaks, some of which are hard to do by yourself.
Fair enough. I thought it was one of those distros that you couldn’t change much once installed. My bad, if incorrect.
You probably think of Bazzite. Same gaming focus, but on immutable base, also very popular :)
No I was thinking of CachyOS, I just incorrectly thought it was immutable. 😊
Yeah, I tried pure Arch first, fucked up by not installing the right drivers for my old Nvidia card, and was never able to really get it running properly. So I gave up and tried CachyOS instead, on the basis that it’d probably get the drivers right for me. And it did.
I’d come with a word of caution then - while CachyOS automatically and conveniently installs with correct defaults, it is still a direct Arch derivative. Going forward, it will be just as easy to screw the system up and not know where to go next.
With that said, I strongly advise to learn to revert any change you can make to your system. The simplest way (assuming CachyOS installed root filesystem as btrfs) is to learn your way around snapper early on. Check tutorials on how to do it right on CachyOS.
With Snapper set up well, you can essentially undo any change. And this will be essential as you learn Arch (which CachyOS still really is).
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