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
Debian Testing.
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)
Save yourself some trouble and run something for servers. You can even setup automatic updates with reboots so you can set it up and forget. I did that with a Debian machine and I forgot about it for a terrifyingly long time. It just auto updated and patched itself when new updates hit.
I like the idea of a stable distro as the host OS and Distrobox with Arch and the AUR for applications.
For most of my machines, I do not need the latest kernel or even the latest desktop environment. But it is a pain to have out of date desktop apps and especially dev tools.
I think this strikes a nice balance.
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.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
I’m sure I’ll get shouted down for this suggestion by the haters, but I’m going to make it anyway because it’s actually really good:
Use an Ubuntu LTS flavour like Kubuntu. Then, add flatpak and for apps you want to keep up to date, install either the flatpak or the snap, depending on the particular app. In my personal experience, sometimes the flatpak is better and sometimes the snap is better. (I would add Nix to the mix, but I wouldn’t call it particularly easy for beginners.)
This gets you:
- A reliable Debian-like base that you only have to upgrade to new releases every 2 years
- Up-to-date apps, including confinement for those apps
- New kernels every 6 months (if you choose - you don’t have to, though)
Ubuntu not only lacks some basic packages but they make apt install them with snap instead.
I would go Debian testing as it has a huge selection of apps and has good support for Flatpak (like pretty much all Linux as Flatpak is build on standard kernel components)
Debian and learn to use the nix package manager for your bleeding edge stuff
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.
You can use dnf on OpenSuse, and it actually uses the correct
/etc/dnf.repos.d!zyppers UI is horrible, no idea at what internet speed those animations make sense, not on an even 2,4GHz wifi.
I used QGis as a Fedora Distrobox didnt install the language package, because it installs only the one from the OS. on Tumbleweed all languages were always installed, but it had some issue where no plugins worked or something.
Same with RStudio, which works creat with iucar/cran COPR and the R-CoprManager app that makes it use dnf underneath.
Rstudio should absolutely install them as libs though, into /var/lib. Then the Flatpak could be made working too I guess.
but then why use OpenSUSE instead of just Fedora?
Because they have Slowroll and working, automatic BTRFS snapshots.
I have no idea what dnf Fedora is doing, using BTRFS but no snapshots.
I think fedora does have some automatic snapshots, just not as much as OpenSUSE. Still tho, why not setup better snapshots on Fedora rather than switch package manager and repos altogether on openSUSE?
I found zypper package speed for download seems to vary a lot, sometimes superfast and other times it drips in like old dialup. Maybe server load or what default server it hits is too many hops away or something. It also does delta doownloads, ehich makes sense if your data is capped, but takes a lot longer to negotiate the lookup for update, compare versions, and pull delta only.
Good thing about zypper and SUSE setup is you can use the various patch, oatches list patches commands to see what is unneeded, recommended or critical, CVE, and if has already been applied to your system or not. Great tool for sysadmin
Yes I would love to have mail notifications etc for security updates.
Currently setting up a server, CentOS installer didnt boot so my lazy ass just rebased to securecore (Fedora IoT -> uBlue uCore -> secureblue) which is very nice but rolling.
With LUKS encryption, which I want and need, this is problematic, as I need to manually type the password afaik. TPM unlock didnt work even though I have a Nitrokey with a TPM integrated afaik.
I am not 100% sure, but I had something similar with passworded drive. There was a way to edit crypt tab stuff so that when system looks for pwd input on boot it went to the hashed file to get password. I forget the steps I did, but online there is a walk through and it was not too difficult to configure…just a few manual file edits
Fedora, Ubuntu etc. use up to date packages if you’re using flatpaks and snaps. Nix I suppose fits the bill better but it’s a harder distro to “learn” than arch imo
How about Rhino? Rolling release of Debian Sid iirc
You could… of course also try to use Debian Testing (which is more stable than Debian Unstable), but also more up to date than just Debian Stable.
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting And see also: https://www.debian.org/releases/testing/ (currently “trixie” is the testing release).
EDIT: I mention this, because nobody mentioned it yet.
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).
please do not use debian testing. it is not fit for production use and will give you headaches, especially when a new release starts approaching
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.
Debian with Flatpak and a Distrobox container running Arch is pretty good if you want a stable desktop with rolling packages.
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You are the meme
They were not asking about immutable Linux…
Atomic distros are still distros, op never excluded that particular kind
True but you could of just said something Fedora based
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+1 for bazzite, if I wasn’t a NixOS cultist it’s probably what I’d still be daily driving. Stable, easy rollbacks, keeps itself updated as long as you reboot now and then. Just a great experience all around.
