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
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.
Is there a good sort of middle ground distro between the reliability of Debian and the up-to-date packages of arch?
This guy:
(OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).
Or maybe Slowroll.
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.
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
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.
