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?
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.
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.
+1 for Fedora. It is exactly what OP is asking for.
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
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
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).
To be 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!
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!
Tumbleweed
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Rolling release, but has QA on the weekly builds. It fits between Debian and Arch for sure.
Nobody here for Mint? I’m a long time Ubuntu user but when i do my next upgrade it will be to mint.
For private use? Hot take, but Arch. It’s easy to maintain and not easy to break at all. I think I spend zero time on maintenance other than running package updates. I only reinstall when I get a new computer.
(I say for private use only because you’ll be getting weird looks from people if you use arch on a server in a professional setting, and it might break if you try to update it after five years of not doing it since there aren’t any “releases” to group big changes - in practice I run arch on my home server too with no issues)
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.
That’s Void Linux, exactly how I would describe Void…
My thoughts exactly. It may take more time to set up (I, for example, never got my laptop speakers working when I installed it there), and it may not have as much hardware support (a shitty old HP pre-built was giving me ACPI errors and refusing to boot; and yes, I had updated the BIOS), but update-wise, it’s super stable, but also quite up-to-date. It’s not crazy (kernel updates take some time occasionally), but it’s a great experience, and the inclusion of runit is fantastic. Hearty recommendation.
You might want to check if your drivers are in the nonfree repo for your speakers/ACPI…
My laptop need those for, let me check… the sound and the ACPI :D
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I guess I’m kind of confused as to the debate between Bleeding Edge vs Stable. I get the concept on paper, but what packages are so imperative that you need a Distro that is “Bleeding Edge”. I run Pop_OS and it works great on my hardware(System76 so it kind of has the home field advantage). I have an old laptop running LMDE that doesn’t ever need rebooted and it has every package I need for it to accomplish its job.
Others have given better advice than I will, but maybe determine why you need something that’s bleeding edge. If the only answer is “Cuz Shiny new stuff!” I don’t think it’s needed that bad and tailor your setup for stability and functionality. I prefer Just Works Distros though. VM’s are also a thing if you want to do some Distro Hopping
I have a gentoo desktop but for a convenient middle ground just put Debian on my laptop. It’s stable, things just work out of the box, maintainers/devs are competent, they haven’t drunk the snap/flatpack kool-aid…
Switching to Testing is always an option but I’ve not found the need to do that yet when I can install programs from a deb package or just compile from source and install it in ~/.bin in my home directory.
