Stable if you want stability, meaning it doesn’t change often (minor updates only).
Testing if you want newer packages that have at least gone through some level of testing. They’ve been in unstable for at least 3-10 days with no major bug reports.
Unstable/sid if you want to assist the Debian project by reporting bugs (which is always appreciated!), or want the “breaks all the time” experience of other distros.
Debian unstable doesn’t break all the time, tho. There’s only been a handful of times in my 27 years of using it that something got truly borked.
(That’s not counting times when two packages have the same file and there’s a conflict. That’s trivial to resolve once you’ve seen it a few times. Even that is relatively rare.)
An arch user defines “doesn’t break all the time” as “I have to read the news before every update and apply a manual intervention a few times a year, and there’s only been like one time in history that an update made people’s installs unbootable despite them taking those precautions”.
A Debian user defines “doesn’t break all the time” as “I have a cron job running that periodically runs sudo apt update. I have no idea when it does this or what’s changing when it happens and nothing bad has ever happened to me”.
Like, the fact that unattended-upgrades comes pre-installed and enabled by default (for security updates) in Debian GNOME vs the fact that informant exists to force you to read the news in Arch before you update should tell you that the two distros exist in two different universes.
I’ve never had Debian or Arch completely break, but have had my share of annoying bugs with both of them. Biggest issue I kept having with Debian is it’d just get stuck and wouldn’t update. Think it was 12.4 I had this problem with. Way more annoying than anything Arch did to my system. I’m using Fedora now days.
I also use Debian and Fedora on different computers so I’m curious, how do they compare in your opinion? Any interesting differences or reasons to use one instead of the other?
I’m not the person you were replying to, but I was dual booting Debian and Fedora for around a month, and ended up sticking with Fedora.
The main benefit of Fedora is that packages are much newer than Debian (even if you run Debian unstable/sid). Some examples I hit:
KDE Plasma 6.0 was released in February this year, and Fedora got it shortly after release. Debian sid still doesn’t have it - it’s in experimental but isn’t in a fully working state yet. Debian doesn’t focus on completing large upgrades like that until it’s closer to the deadline for the next release.
Until last month, the AMD graphics firmware (and in fact, all non-free firmware) in Debian stable, testing, and unstable was a version from over a year ago (June 2023) that had a bunch of bugs and didn’t support newer GPUs properly at all. See the version numbers here: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/firmware-nonfree/news/. On laptops like the Framework 16, you hace to manually download firmware from a repo on kernel.org and place the files in the right spot. Fedora comes with the latest firmware in each release.
Fedora also has some niceties, for example it comes with Plymouth (graphical boot-up and shut-down screen) installed out-of-the-box instead of showing a bunch of scrolling text.
The Debian approach is fantastic for servers. Servers have hardware that generally doesn’t change during its lifespan, and need to be stable. A server you set up today still needs to be working the same way 2 or 3 years from now, without worrying about major breaking changes. You can install unattended-upgrades and get automatic security/bugfix updates with very little risk of anything breaking.
On the other hand, for a desktop environment, running the latest versions can have some benefits. Hardware and can change often (especially GPUs and their drivers), desktop environments fix bugs and add new features weekly, etc.
I don’t mind Debian on desktop, but IMO Fedora is better. I’ve been running Debian on servers for over 20 years though, and I’ll continue doing so.
One thing I can’t stand about Fedora is the installer. It might be because I’m more familiar with debian-installer, but I find partitioning in Fedora’s installer much more difficult. I was trying to set up a fairly standard layout on my laptop (EFI partition, /boot partition, LUKS encryption partition with LVM in it, then / and /home ext4 LVs) and I got so frustrated that I set it up in the Debian installer then rebooted into the Fedora installer lol
I’ve had a similar experience. About the old packages with bugs, I think that can work both ways. The newer packages might have bug fixes, but also new features with different bugs. Sometimes it feels like the number of bugs is constant, you just have to choose between old known bugs or new unknown bugs.
I agree. Maybe this is because Debian tries to be everything, the universal OS, server or desktop or whatever, while for example Fedora Workstation can be preconfigured as a workstation. Back in the day around 2008 this is what Ubuntu was to me, a Debian Workstation. Now it’s different, they’ve diverged so much. Maybe Spiral Linux could be a preconfigured Debian Workstation now.
Yes, Debian packages are old. Tell me again when your arch install breaks for the 4th time this week.
and you have a choice with Debian. You can run:
Debian unstable doesn’t break all the time, tho. There’s only been a handful of times in my 27 years of using it that something got truly borked.
(That’s not counting times when two packages have the same file and there’s a conflict. That’s trivial to resolve once you’ve seen it a few times. Even that is relatively rare.)
Arch doesn’t break all the time either, but it’s a meme and therefor 100% true.
An arch user defines “doesn’t break all the time” as “I have to read the news before every update and apply a manual intervention a few times a year, and there’s only been like one time in history that an update made people’s installs unbootable despite them taking those precautions”.
A Debian user defines “doesn’t break all the time” as “I have a cron job running that periodically runs sudo apt update. I have no idea when it does this or what’s changing when it happens and nothing bad has ever happened to me”.
Like, the fact that unattended-upgrades comes pre-installed and enabled by default (for security updates) in Debian GNOME vs the fact that informant exists to force you to read the news in Arch before you update should tell you that the two distros exist in two different universes.
Yeah, it was just a response to the Arch memes since I’m sure Arch doesn’t break all the time either.
I’ve never had Debian or Arch completely break, but have had my share of annoying bugs with both of them. Biggest issue I kept having with Debian is it’d just get stuck and wouldn’t update. Think it was 12.4 I had this problem with. Way more annoying than anything Arch did to my system. I’m using Fedora now days.
Same issue as this person: https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=156345. That’s not even mentioning the 12.3 debacle which I was thankfully spared of.
The only breakage I used to get was having to update the keyring because I had been away and not spamming pacman -Syyu for gasp several days.
I mostly use Debian and Fedora, so you’re preaching to the choir
I also use Debian and Fedora on different computers so I’m curious, how do they compare in your opinion? Any interesting differences or reasons to use one instead of the other?
I’m not the person you were replying to, but I was dual booting Debian and Fedora for around a month, and ended up sticking with Fedora.
The main benefit of Fedora is that packages are much newer than Debian (even if you run Debian unstable/sid). Some examples I hit:
KDE Plasma 6.0 was released in February this year, and Fedora got it shortly after release. Debian sid still doesn’t have it - it’s in experimental but isn’t in a fully working state yet. Debian doesn’t focus on completing large upgrades like that until it’s closer to the deadline for the next release.
Until last month, the AMD graphics firmware (and in fact, all non-free firmware) in Debian stable, testing, and unstable was a version from over a year ago (June 2023) that had a bunch of bugs and didn’t support newer GPUs properly at all. See the version numbers here: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/firmware-nonfree/news/. On laptops like the Framework 16, you hace to manually download firmware from a repo on kernel.org and place the files in the right spot. Fedora comes with the latest firmware in each release.
Fedora also has some niceties, for example it comes with Plymouth (graphical boot-up and shut-down screen) installed out-of-the-box instead of showing a bunch of scrolling text.
The Debian approach is fantastic for servers. Servers have hardware that generally doesn’t change during its lifespan, and need to be stable. A server you set up today still needs to be working the same way 2 or 3 years from now, without worrying about major breaking changes. You can install
unattended-upgradesand get automatic security/bugfix updates with very little risk of anything breaking.On the other hand, for a desktop environment, running the latest versions can have some benefits. Hardware and can change often (especially GPUs and their drivers), desktop environments fix bugs and add new features weekly, etc.
I don’t mind Debian on desktop, but IMO Fedora is better. I’ve been running Debian on servers for over 20 years though, and I’ll continue doing so.
One thing I can’t stand about Fedora is the installer. It might be because I’m more familiar with debian-installer, but I find partitioning in Fedora’s installer much more difficult. I was trying to set up a fairly standard layout on my laptop (EFI partition, /boot partition, LUKS encryption partition with LVM in it, then / and /home ext4 LVs) and I got so frustrated that I set it up in the Debian installer then rebooted into the Fedora installer lol
I’ve had a similar experience. About the old packages with bugs, I think that can work both ways. The newer packages might have bug fixes, but also new features with different bugs. Sometimes it feels like the number of bugs is constant, you just have to choose between old known bugs or new unknown bugs.
I think Fedora requires less configuration because a lot comes working out of the box. I haven’t had any issues yet
I agree. Maybe this is because Debian tries to be everything, the universal OS, server or desktop or whatever, while for example Fedora Workstation can be preconfigured as a workstation. Back in the day around 2008 this is what Ubuntu was to me, a Debian Workstation. Now it’s different, they’ve diverged so much. Maybe Spiral Linux could be a preconfigured Debian Workstation now.
I literally have my OS set to be as bleeding edge as possible since I find it fun. That’s until it breaks, then I hate myself.
Ig doing sysadmin is my hobby.