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?
fedora is a good middle ground
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
To ne honest PopOS is great. Frequent updates, good (subjective) design and ui choices, just works. If it fits your vibe I would say it is a good balance!
It also has the benefit of being able to apply the vast majority of Ubuntu tutorials, etc. since it’s based on it. Plus it doesn’t force you to use snaps for everything.
I’m running PopOS on a computer for wathing media at home. I’m not too impressed. I read a bunch of comment threads recommening it so I treid it out. They seem a bit unstable – that at least falls in OP middle ground. I made an update and dpms management was just different, like the screen is no longer turning itself off. I’ve had some thing like this happen on it. It’s not breakage, it’s a bit annoying. “Just works”? Eh, sure, kinda’.
Sorry to hear that, milage varies depending on hardware, I suppose. I have had it running on a Lenovo laptop for over a year without issues. Hope you find good distro fitting your needs and hardware specs out of the box!
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Rolling release, but has QA on the weekly builds. It fits between Debian and Arch for sure.
Fedora is a good middle ground, it’s what Asahi Linux uses as its official distro
Another upvote for Fedora. I tried SO many flavors over the years and every single one of them, while cool and neat up front eventually developed “something” that was too problematic.
So I asked for a recommendation with a very specific set of things that I needed from a distribution. Everybody told me to just stop messing around with different flavors and just go with plain old vanilla Fedora.
It has been rock solid and perfect in every way, and I no longer have that need to distrohop because I’m missing something.
OpenSUSE tumbleweed is a good compromise IMO. it is also a rolling release distro with built in snapshotting. So if anything does go wrong it takes ~5 mins to roll back to the last good snapshot. You can set the same thing up on arch but it isn’t ootb and YAST is a great management tool as well.
I would say Tumblewees is better than traditional Fedora.
But the lack of desktops, variants, adoption, as well as the lack of being able to reset a system, makes it less stable than Fedora Atomic Desktops.
Resetting is huge. You can revert to a bit-by-bit copy of the current upstream.
It is not complete at all, but already works as a daily driver. uBlue deals with almost all the edges that are left.
Tbh my main gripe with Tumbleweed is the package manager as someone who likes to use the CLI, the weird naming convention, renames, etc are annoying. Also found some minor annoyances that all put together made me choose Fedora over Tumbleweed. I can see why some people would like it tho.
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.
I’d say Fedora is the middle-ground. You get up-to-date software in a stable distribution with daily security updates, and fixed OS upgrades each year.
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
I wouldn’t call them up to date but they are a little newer than Debian with the exception of Pop OS.
wouldn’t call them up to date
they are a little newer
Huh
What is confusing? It is newer than Debian but still fairly out of date compared to Fedora or the latest Ubuntu release
Debian-Testing (Trixie) is the way to go. It’s a rolling release, but it’s very stable, because packages end up there after being tested in Sid (their unstable rolling release). Whatever makes it out of Trixie, ends up on the normal Debian. I’ve been running it since April without any breakages.
Absolutely. Here’s three options
Fedora updates every, or around every, 3 months. This is very stable but very up to date.Most professional devs particularly ones working in Linux projects use it fornit’s relative stability while having modern packages.
There’s also PopOS! which is a rolling release, updating daily, but much more delayed than arch thus being much more usable.
Now for my favourite, OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Same style as PopOs but with a KDE, or gnome spin or of the box. A bit more sleek too. It also has YAST which is the best GUI based managment system on Linux.
I use arch (btw) but have a second duel booted tumbleweed install for work related stuff in order tonensure stability
Wait, Pop_OS switched to rolling release?
From their website:
"Update on Your Terms
Pop!_OS provides the latest features and security patches through rolling updates and periodic OS version upgrades, to be performed at your discretion. And if you want a clean slate, the Refresh Install feature resets your OS while preserving the files in your Home folder. "
It also has YAST which is the best GUI based managment system on Linux
Semi-offtopic. Suse was my first distro 20 years ago and in those few months I had such a nightmarish experience with dependency hell in YAST and Yum, and such a contrastingly good experience with APT after I finally moved to Debian, that I have only ever used Debian and Ubuntu since then and I am still traumatized by the mere sight of the name YAST.
Silly but alas true! Of course I didn’t understand anything back then and I’m sure YAST is much better these days.
Pop OS is very much not a rolling release
another recomendation for Fedora from me
They don’t package LTS kernels which is pretty concerning—especially if using out-of-kernel modules that don’t always get released in lock step that could leave you with a machine that won’t boot.
That’s true. i do sometimes have issues with the ZFS package not compiling because of a too new kernel not being supported yet.
Debian Testing has a lot more current packages, and is generally fairly stable. Debian Unstable is rolling release, and mostly a misnomer (but it is subject to massive changes at a moment’s notice).
Fedora is like Debian Testing: a good middleground between current and stable.
I hear lots of good things about Nix, but I still haven’t tried it. It seems to be the perfect blend of non-breaking and most up-to-date.
I’ll just add to: don’t believe everything you hear. Distrowars result in rhetoric that’s way blown out of proportion. Arch isn’t breaking down more often than a cybertruck, and Debian isn’t so old that it yearns for the performance of Windows Vista.
Arch breaks, so does anything that tries to push updates at the drop of a hat; it’s unlikely to brick your pc, and you’ll just need to reconfigure some settings.
Debian is stable as its primary goal, this means the numbers don’t look as big on paper; for that you should be playing cookie clicker, instead of micromanaging the worlds’ most powerful web browser.
Try things out for yourself and see what fits, anyone who says otherwise is just trying to program you into joining their culture war
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
SuSE Slowroll. Not rolling release. Also not super-conservative like Debian is.
