We all have different definitions of "working system". I call a first time boot into alpine linux (after installing docs and ditching busybox) or openbsd a fully working system.
I installed arch last night in less than 20 minutes. The longest part was figuring out how to connect WiFi from the terminal. But I googled it and it was easy.
3.Arch is more than AUR. It's a bleeding edge, very lightweight distro. And both characteristics go into Manjaro - granted, there's a two week review period and some stuff installed on top. At the end, you get a super snappy, super nice system with a lot of value added on top of it.
I'm a Linux noob, using Manjo for almost two years no prob
One time an update needed manual intervention and I've fucked it up. But afaik on Arch this also happens so 🤷♂️
I might be wrong, but after thinking about this for a while I came to the conclusion that probably most of their packages come from AUR in God knows what conditions. Also, has a funny alias for pacman that breaks everything.
Arch is pretty stable and often more usable than something based on Debian from my experience fedoras better but has so many more bugs compared to arch. I chose arch because everything was broken on Debian and fedora based stuff. Leave me alone with your philosophy about "out dates software is stable software".
Not everyone uses a ten year old system and bugs in graphical software that exist when the new version of Debian drops exists for pretty much the whole releases lifecycle from my experience and that's painful.
Debian is literally one of the most stable systems out there. It only pails in comparison to RHEL and RHEL like systems but the stability difference isn't huge. Arch on the other hand you get updates daily and they create breaking changes.
I'm not talking about stability I'm talking about it actually working on modern hardware without receiving updates that break things or a lack of support at all. Trust me, I've tried on multiple devices and it was painful. I'm never gonna recommend Debian for anyone who wants to use it on a desktop period.
Also Nvidia drivers broke on Debian she couldn't watch anything off the movie server until I rolled back the driver, a fix I've never had to do on my primary computer. A much newer version on my arch install and I didn't have to worry about back ported patches bricking software.
I don't care what you guys think just stop trying to convince people that the choices they make are wrong. Everyone has different use cases and different requirements.
"stable" just means deal with different issues that are often more confusing, annoying, and don't exist anywhere ese like outdated libraries that don't work with concurrent git projects.
Trying to get any non free software working in an intuitive manor when the internet doesn't even work out of the box and your looking at a 4 year old version of gnome for one of your first forays outside of Ubuntu. I'm sure that recommendation works out real nice for newcomers. So fucking annoying to take advice like that and barely manage to install it just for it to be a mess of expired ssl certificates and apt to not work when you finally managed to connect it to the Internet.
I downloaded it from the website how hard can it be to make it work out of the box. Give me a raw arch install anyday. At least I know what's even happening. Or at least give me something that works out of the box like fedora tries to do.
I'm sorry for any Debian fans I offended. It's great for a server but you gotta know something about the weird stuff Debian does to even understand how to coexist with it. Ubuntu became popular for a reason and it's annoying that it solves so many of Debian shortcomings but thems the breaks.
I don't like Ubuntu but Debian alright in my book it's a community thing and Debian users have their own language I can't speak. Most my computers just didn't run Debian, too new and buggy because of it.
I guess what I'm getting at is stable is great. But it doesn't run on half of my shit and things that are simple in other distros are (at least for me) unintuitive and not very well documented on the Debian wiki.
It would make it easier if it didn't take five minutes to load every page and sometimes fail to load at all. I'm fond of doing my own research but Debian's wiki is super slow.
No, it's a rolling release. Stable means that behaviours don't change during a support cycle of a major version. A rolling release can't be stable since it doesn't have major versions.
Your funny, I think the word your looking for is stagnant. I've never seen any substantial evidence of a distro with outdated packages really being any more reliable than a rolling release.
I've only had a Debian server for six months and have already ran into issues with botched updates multiple times on bookworm. I only use it for zfs because Debian often runs a kernel old enough to support it. I had an arch server run for nine years no issues zfs just takes a bit to support the latest lts kernel.
I've troubleshooted Debian just about as much as I've troubleshooted arch so what's your point.
The behavior doesn't change until they brick a driver or mess up your software without any worning months after that release taking them over a week to fix it. 😆 Thanks Debian for consuming a whole afternoon just before movie night with the family started.
I’ve never seen any substantial evidence of a distro with outdated packages really being any more reliable than a rolling release.
I think the fundamental issue here is that you conflate the concepts of reliablility and stability. Those are not the same. Stability in distros is a question of how much they restrict change during support cycles in order to not be a moving target for developers and system integrators. Fundamentally a rolling release can't be stable. It can absolutely be reliable to use, but you wouldn't use it as a basis for an embedded system you're trying to develop.
I've heard the counter argument from developers that jumping from a two to four years old codebase is an absolute nightmare to deal with and moving to a rolling release means not dealing with the burden of migrating over to a newer version and implementing small patches when needed.
Entire fixes, features, and upgrades miss the deadline and have to wait because of a process like this. It's still a moving target but on a different scale. They try to roll the newest packages possible into the release meaning the majority of the bug fixing and testing happens mere months before release.
It's a solid concept but so much changes all at once it's a big project to migrate to a newer version. It frontloads a lot of the work sometimes to the point of delaying support for the newer version. Unless you build for Debian unstable and work backwards from there (basically rolling) but doesn't guarantee back ports don't break the software.
It only benefits users who need a set it and forget it solution. I chose it for my server because I don't want to touch it but I dread the day I have to upgrade the whole system and something small like the zfs filesystem, docker, or my samba setup suddenly has issues and makes it unbootable like that kernel update that bricked my Nvidia drivers a couple months ago. I'm hoping that's a fluke because it happened at the worst time for me.
It's four years from now, I don't have to think about it yet.
I'm installing Debian next time. Arch is OK but it breaks too often and keeping everything working in an Arch installation is a full time job. Void Linux is like Arch but more stable. Voids weakness is that some of the underlying libraries are different (something about multilib and glibc I think) and there are certain Linux programs that can never run in void and you can't get them. Monodevelop and virtual box for example. I might have to switch to something else soon just because I need this stuff. (yes I know about qemu and bochs, yes I know about compiling basic c# programs via the command line, and all of that is unsuitable for my use case). Void seems to be a great choice as long as you don't need to use Monodevelop or virtualbox though. It's great at gaming once you switch to x11.
There's a good chance Debian will have a harder time playing steam games due to older mesa drivers or something but it might be a necessary tradeoff.
Edit: also, WTF is the font situation in Void Linux? Half my webpages are have some shitty font front the 90s instead of whatever the normal font is and most of my pdfs look weird and can't be printed because of it. I have just about every single thing in Void repository with the word "font" installed yet I still have to get out my Ubuntu laptop every time I want to print a pdf.
I use arch as a daily driver. Very seldom have any issues, and any issues I do have are from the software. I.e. mesa breaking vaapi, grub breaking boot, etc.
Use stagnant software if you can't spare 5 minutes once in a while rolling back problematic packages.
This isn't actually true. They offer both glibc and musl these days. Glibc is the normal one most Linux distros use. Musl doesn't work with some things, but is still desirable to some people for various reasons. Flatpak could be used to work around this, as it should pull in whatever libc that the program needs. Distrobox would also work. Though again this only applies of using the musl libc version.
Another potential sore point is not using systemd init. There are some things dependant on systemd, though generally there are packages which act as a replacement for whatever systemd functionality is needed.
I still have no idea what's wrong with Voids fonts though. You are on your own there!
I use Debian Stable as my daily driver. No issues with steam. No issues with old packages, everything just works and is, I'm not sure why I'm shocked at this, kinda stable.
I've had a Debian server in my basement for 4 or 5 years. I've encountered a total of 2 entire issues the entire time I've had that running. One of which was actual bullshit that I'm still pissed about but the other issue I eventually fixed on my own. It has worked well enough that Debian deserves a go at being a daily driver next time I do an os reinstall.
I really really wish I could come up with a command line script way to issue a command that makes the computer reconnect to the wifi without human intervention of any kind, without so much as even a single ui password dialog, but that's not a distro specific thing. I use iwctl right now, it seems to be the most reliable and I've tried them all.
