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, it’s what Asahi Linux uses as its official distro
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.
Fedora is generally pretty good
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
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Rolling release, but has QA on the weekly builds. It fits between Debian and Arch for sure.
Fedora and Debian testing
Having used the same Testing install since early 2022, I’d say it’s not too bad. Stability-wise, I only have a major problem once a year.
Eventually, you get tired of having to switch to Flatpaks while packages transition. I’ll either stay on Trixie when it goes to stable or reinstall. It’s still an ext4 system and I want something different, as stable as ext4 is. I’ve been using btrfs on my new laptop for about a month and have been happy.
Honestly, in the age of Flatpaks, stable Debian is fine for most people in my opinion.
A major issue once a year is kind of high. The number of major issues should be zero
True; as said, this is Debian Testing. By “major issue”, I mean Grub occasionally gets borked and I have to chroot in and fix it, or the time_t_64 transition.
I found the compromise between stability and newer packages acceptable for my desktop machine, which I am usually only on when I would actually have the time to debug these things. However, these days, I’m busy, thus may switch to stable in the next few months.
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).
Or with Flatpak!
Slackware current.
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.
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.
While I never saw the benefit (it is to complex) I do think it isn’t a bad choice
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.
IMO Debian is already pretty far middle-ground. The packages are new enough for my personal usage.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
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 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.
