I’ll never stop hating that debian is labeled stable. I’m fully aware that they are using the definition of stable that simply means not updating constantly but the problem is that people conflate that with stability as in unbreaking. Except it’s the exact opposite in my experience, I’ve had apt absolutely obliterate debian systems way too often. Vs pacman on arxh seems to be exceptionally good at avoiding that. Sure the updated package itself could potentially have a bug or cause a problem but I can’t think of any instance where the actual process of updating itself is what eviscerated the system like with apt and dpkg.
And even in the event of an update going catastrophically wrong to the point that the system is inoperable I can simply chroot in use a statically built binary pacman and in a oneliner command reinstall ALL native packages in one go which I’ve never had not fix a borked system from interrupted update or needing a rollback
depends on workload. Debian has very old packages and can be insecure but it is a set it and forget it type of thing, it is good when uptime is critical for a server. For desktops, or servers that need better security, but can tolerate a little downtime, rolling releases are good too, if you are enough to update frequently, and you should, since updates usually contain a lot of patched vulrenabilities
Good point! But I recently swapped to Debian 12 from Fedora 41. The latter needing constant updates several times a day. And despite this, it was not stable at all.
Fedora is good on laptops since it has the very newest kernel and thus includes all the latest driver fixes (which are needed for laptops like the Framework where they’re actively improving things). On the other hand, it has the very newest kernel and thus includes all the latest bugs.
You are maybe conflating stability with convenience.
“Why is this stable version of my OS unstable when I update and or install new packages…”
The entire OS falling down randomly on every distribution during normal OS background operations was always an issue or worry, and old Debbie Stables was meant to help make linux feel reliable for production server use, and it has done a decent job at it.
I mean when I can take an Arch Linux installation that I forgot about on my server and is now 8 years out of date and simply manually update the key ring and then be up to date without any issue but every time I’ve ever tried to do many multiple major version jumps on debian it’s died horrifically… I would personally call the latter less stable. Or at least less robust lol.
I genuinely think that because Arch Linux is a rolling distribution that it’s update process is just somehow more thorough and less likely to explode.
The last one with debian was a buster to bookworm jump. Midway through something went horrifically wrong and dpkg just bailed out. The only problem was that it somehow during all of that removed the entirety of every binary in /bin. Leaving the system completely inoperable and I attempted to Google for a similar solution as arch. Where i could chroot in and fix it with one simple line. But so far as I was able to find there is no such option with apt/dpkg. If I wanted to attempt to recover the system it would have been an entirely manual Endeavor with a lot of pain.
I would also personally label having the tools to recover from catastrophic failure as being an important part of stability especially when people advocate for things like Debian in a server critical environment and actively discourage the use of things like Arch
If the only thing granting at the title of stability is the lack of update frequency that can simply be recreated on Arch Linux by just not updating frequentlyಠ_ಠ
I mean when I can take an Arch Linux installation that I forgot about on my server and is now 8 years out of date and simply manually update the key ring and then be up to date
That won’t work, old pacman versions can’t deal with the fact that packages are now zstandard compressed. In fact, the window were you could successful do the update without a whole bunch of additional work was something like a couple of months. Certainly a whole lot less than a year.
Did you go buster -> bullseye -> bookworm or just straight to bookworm? It sounds like something got screwed up with the usr merge.
No opinion on Debian but as a heavy ArchLinux user I should point out you shouldn’t upgrade without reading the news as occasionally manual intervention is required. Upgrades can and will break things if you’re not careful.
https://archlinux.org/news/openblas-0323-2-update-requires-manual-intervention/
https://archlinux.org/news/ansible-core-2153-1-update-may-require-manual-intervention/
https://archlinux.org/news/incoming-changes-in-jdk-jre-21-packages-may-require-manual-intervention/
it would have been an entirely manual Endeavor with a lot of pain.
It’s funny that your phone auto corrected or you typed a capital E out of habit. I imagine you talk about Endeavor OS a lot lol.
While I personally agree with your sentiment, and much prefer arch to debian for my own systems, there is one way where debian can be more stable. When projects release software with bugs I usually have to deal with those on Arch, even if someone else has already submitted the bug reports upstream and they are already being worked on. There are often periods of a couple of weeks where something is broken - usually nothing big enough to be more than a minor annoyance that I can work around. Admittedly, I could just stop doing updates when everything seems to be working, to stay in a more stable state, but debian is a bit more broadly and thoroughly tested. Although the downside is that when upstream bugs do slip through into debian, they tend to stay there longer than they do on arch. That said, most of those bugs wouldn’t get fixed as fast upstream if not for rolling distro users testing things and finding bugs before buggy releases get to non-rolling “stable” distros.
FWIW I’ve got a Debian server that hosts most of my sites and primary DNS server, that’s been running since Etch (4.0, 2007ish). I’ve upgraded it over the years, switched from a dedicated server to OpenVZ to KVM, and it’s still running today on Bookworm. No major issues with upgrades.
It’s definitely not something that will happen 100%. I’ve also had long standing debian systems that seem to not care. However I’ve had plenty that, for whatever reason couldn’t handle multiple major version hops and just eviscerated themselves, I’ve not had that with arch personally. You may need to download the latest statically built pacman depending on how old it is but that and a keyring update usually has you covered
However I’ve had plenty that, for whatever reason couldn’t handle multiple major version hops
Debian only supports upgrading one major version at a time. If you’re upgrading from Debian 10 to 12, you need to first do 10 to 11, then 11 to 12. Upgrading multiple versions at a time is completely untested and unsupported.
Ha. You want STABLE, use NixOS.
If you’re cannot parse the configuration file, you don’t update. It is perfectly, 100% stable, about 60% of the time (when I change my config file without an error).
nixOS appeals to niche audiences who like to brag about it. I think it is not a good idea to base everything on config files, since there is a lot of room for user error
The config files literally won’t compile if there is an incompatibility or error in the code.
Also, every distro has an audience who love to brag about it. The worst part of being a Nix user is I can no longer say “Arch BTW”.
You’ve literally described Linux. Wasn’t even a week ago we had a circle jerk on here about how great it is that everything on Linux is an ascii file (technically inaccurate on most distros) rather than a nasty nasty database where the most you can fuck up at a time is a single entry vs breaking the schema of an entire file.
Flexibility translates to unpredictable.
I’ve never had any issues with my Arch install being unpredictable. It has always worked exactly as I expected it to, even though I update it every couple of days.
It has always worked exactly as I expected it to
Just expect it to break, then it will behave as expected taps head
I’ve been using Arch since 2014. If I could be arsed, I could write you a looooooooong list of regressions I’ve had to deal with over the years. For an experienced Linux user, they’re usually fairly easy to deal with, but saying you never have to deal with anything is just a lie.
My experience with Arch is basically: it’s all very predictable until it isn’t and you suddenly find yourself troubleshooting something random like unexplainable bluetooth disconnects caused by a firmware or kernel update.
Did you consider that the problems you have might not be problems that other people experience? I very highly doubt our two systems are at all similar. Your experience is just that, yours, and so you don’t have any right to be arbitor over whether or not I’m lying.
What you’ve said is true, though it’s a bit of a trade-off – over the years I’ve wasted so many hours with those “user friendly” distros because I need a newer version of a dependency, or I need to install something that isn’t in the repos. Worst case I have to figure out how to compile it myself.
It’s very rare to find something that isn’t in the Arch official repos or the AUR. Personally I’ve found that being on the bleeding edge tends to save me time in the long run, as there’s almost no barriers to getting the packages that I need.
imagine if you update it after 2 weeks. Arch is okay, if you keep backups. otherwise, you are basically playing a russian roulette
Just use kvm/qemu and install it. When I want to play with detailed setups I install slackware and start configuring/compiling.
i started learning about linux 4 months ago. Installed Arch with archinstall pretty easily to a VM, it booted up no problem. But you have to manually install the desktop, if you want a gui (who doesn’t lol). But there are many desktops for Arch, the most common ones have pretty good documentation. But if i were you, i’d experiment with some more niche desktop emviroments
No need to manually install desktop environments, archinstall also does that (Profile --> Desktop).
I haved used many distros and DEs. my favorites are keyboard driven like i3 and such. For now i use fedora because i needed something to work out of the box. I would like to stay in the terminal.
Sees “Germany”
Die Kommentarspalte dieser Pfostierung befindet sich ab sofort im Besitz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland meine Kameraden!
Ahoi, Genosse! Wie läuft die Germanisierung? Verbreiten Sie erfolgreich das Wort von Linux in Ihrem Heimatland?
(Übersetzung von DeepL)
Ohhh ich spreche auch Wurst. Wie geht es ihnen mein Herr, toetet den fuehrer und benutzt Linux statt Fenster.
Ich bevorzuge:
𝕯𝖎𝖊𝖘𝖊 𝕶𝖔𝖒𝖒𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖆𝖗𝖘𝖊𝖐𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓 𝖎𝖘𝖙 𝖓𝖚𝖓 𝕰𝖎𝖌𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖚𝖒 𝖉𝖊𝖗 𝕭𝖚𝖓𝖉𝖊𝖘𝖗𝖊𝖕𝖚𝖇𝖑𝖎𝖐 𝕯𝖊𝖚𝖙𝖘𝖈𝖍𝖑𝖆𝖓𝖉
Fedora 41 is now the ‘wait 45 seconds every boot because you don’t have a tpm chip’ version.
What’s wrong with your Fedora installation? Mine doesn’t do that (also without a TPM chip)
Seems to be specific to some AMD models. I’m running it on a ~ten year old Asus. Timeout waiting for tpm as seen in someone else’s post at https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/much-longer-boot-time-after-updating-to-fedora-41/132603/15
Problem only occurred after upgrading from 40 to 41 - can be seen by pressing Esc while it’s booting.
Can i get some context please? My fedora install wasn’t using TPM, i had to manually configure it; i haven’t noticed any difference in boot speed with or without TPM encryption
I want to have data-at-rest encryption, so that the only password i need to insert is my user one, this allows me to not have to type passwords multiple times. If i had the regular encryption password i would have to enable autologin in SDDM, which would do away with the encryption on kdewallet and all my credentials.
Plus i also enable secureboot, and use fedora kinoite, so that i is hard to tamper with my boot stuff without my TPM wiping itself off my encryption password, this gives me a very Bitlocker-like setup, but without the shittiness of having my encryption keys linked to microsoft’s terrible encryption system and user accounts, i can actually control my stuff like this. For a laptop, i must say data-at-rest encryption is a must!
This setup gives me multiple security layers; took my laptop off me -> booted my laptop, faced with user password -> tried to boot another OS, TPM wiped itself, no more encryption key -> computer now asks for encryption password, has to find a way around LVM2 encryption -> LVM2 encryption (somehow) defeated they must now crack my user password, or have to (try) to decrypt my credentials on the file system itself; after all these convoluted and extremely hard steps i think we can agree this person really deserves to have access to my cool wallpapers
