so a common claim I see made is that arch is up to date than Debian but harder to maintain and easier to break. Is there a good sort of middle ground distro between the reliability of Debian and the up-to-date packages of arch?

  • Cenotaph@mander.xyzEnglish
    9·
    1 hour ago

    I’ve found openSUSE tumbleweed to be the perfect mix between stable and constant updates. By default uses brtfs so if you break something the fix is a simple as rolling back to the snapshot that was automatically made right before the update

  • gandalf_der_12te
    3·
    2 hours ago

    IMO Debian is already pretty far middle-ground. The packages are new enough for my personal usage.

  • Elieas@lemmy.ml
    7·
    3 hours ago

    Debian Stable isn’t the only way to run Debian though people often act like it. That said, if you want the stability of Debian Stable then run it with the nix package manager (nix-bin).

  • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
    10·
    3 hours ago

    What’s wrong with Ubuntu/Mint/PopOS/Fedora or any of the distros usually recommended? They’re easier to maintain and more up to date than Debian

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1·
      1 hour ago

      I wouldn’t call them up to date but they are a little newer than Debian with the exception of Pop OS.

  • ScottE@lemm.ee
    3·
    2 hours ago

    Arch is not harder to maintain nor is it easier to break, that’s a myth. If anything, it’s the opposite, as a rolling release stays up to date, though it relies on the user keeping it up to date. If you get lazy with updates, then yes, you are going to have problems eventually.

    • yoevli@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 hours ago

      I hate when people insist that Arch isn’t easier to break. There was an incident a couple of years ago where a Grub update was rolled out that required that grub-mkconfig be re-run manually, and if you failed to do this the system would brick and you’d need to fix it in a recovery environment. This happened to my laptop while I was on vacation, and while I had luckily had the foresight to bring a flash drive full of ISOs, it was a real pain to fix.

      Yes, Arch offers a lot more stability than people give it credit for, but it’s still less reliable than the popular point-release distros like Fedora or Ubuntu, and there’s not really any way around that with a rolling-release model. As someone who is at a point in life where I don’t always have the time nor energy to deal with random breakage (however infrequently), having the extra peace of mind is nice.

  • ⸻ Ban DHMO 🇦🇺 ⸻@aussie.zoneEnglish
    2·
    2 hours ago

    Atomic distros + distrobox/toolbx. Bluefin is a good start for general desktop or Bazzite for gaming (But Bluefin can be more stable, I use it for some games with steam in flatpak). If something breaks roll back to any release in the last 90 days with a single command. Install all of your packages in a distrobox (Arch if you need it). Otherwise in general Fedora is pretty good.

  • Darohan@lemmy.zip
    4·
    3 hours ago

    This may be an unpopular opinion, but NixOS. It has package up-to-dateness comparable to (and sometimes better than) Arch, but between being declarative (and reproducible) and allowing rollbacks, it’s much harder to break. The cost is, of course, having to learn how to use NixOS, as it’s a fair bit different to using a “normal” Linux distro.

    • thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 hours ago

      Double this, nix has entirely changed my perspective on what I should expect from software and my operating system. It’s so rock solid and roll backs are easy. Reproduction with all the customization you could ever want with incredible transparency.

  • edinbruh@feddit.it
    3·
    3 hours ago

    I would say:

    • Fedora if you like a point release, which means that every 6 months you do a big update of core stuff like the desktop environment, and on Fedora everything else is always generally up to date.
    • OpenSUSE Thumbleweed if you like a rolling release, which means that you don’t do big updates, everything is kept to the last version that the software repository has, this is how arch works except in Thumbleweed the repositories are updated slower than in arch and less likely to break.

    But you could also go for any more up to date debian-based distro, like Pop_OS or even Ubuntu, they might be easier for a newbie user. Fedora and OpenSUSE will be more up to date though.

    If you do use Ubuntu, don’t stick to just LTS versions, use the last version available (which right now happens to be an LTS version). The “extra support” it offers is not something desktop users care about, it’s outweighted by the benefits of more updated software.

  • houndeyes@toast.oooEnglish
    21·
    5 hours ago

    Is there a good sort of middle ground distro between the reliability of Debian and the up-to-date packages of arch?

    This guy:

    Or maybe Slowroll.

    • doubtingtammy@lemmy.ml
      1·
      12 minutes ago

      This. (although I follow the directions here, which is a little more than apt install). The only thing I couldn’t get on Debian stable is the latest gnome. But when I tried debian testing, it was slightly broken anyway. And gnome extensions could get most of the functionality missing in my older gnome version. Debian stable + flatpak + anaconda + adding repositories (like for firefox) is a perfect compromise.

      What’s nice about a stable distro is you can update the things you want to update, and your OS isn’t constantly changing a million packages a week that you don’t even know the function of.

    • melroy@kbin.melroy.org
      1·
      5 hours ago

      Yes somebody did mention Debian Sid, which is Debian unstable. Which is maybe even more up to date (I still don’t consider it rolling release, because there will be a package freeze, if not multiple).

      • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        1 hour ago

        Sid is very much living on the edge. I wouldn’t advise using it. (Although I don’t advise Arch either)