yo you can just turn a choice into a meme and the crowd will go crazy
If you want up-to-date rolling release packages without living dangerously, I recommend openSUSE Tumbleweed. It breaks way less than most other rolling distros such as Arch. I don’t know how they achieve it but they do.
Use Guix/Nix, have your cake and eat it
“I’m on the bleeding edge of Linux! I get the most advanced features the distro allows! Yeah, it may periodically brick my home system from time to time, but its worth it when I can get…”
reorganizing the symlink layout of the NVIDIA firmware
“… which I literally cannot live without”.
I have many other things I’d rather do on my computer, than mess around with the OS. I just want one that works and stays out of my way. Oh, and doesn’t spy on me.
Best of both worlds:
- install boring stable distro
- use Homebrew to install bleeding edge stuff, separately from the base system.
Still feels like a hat on a hat. Unless you’re on bleeding edge hardware doing something truly novel with the OS, I’m not sure why a selective opt-in log of various bolt-ons and patches improves your experience.
Computers, at their heart, are still just a place you go to manage spreadsheets, email other people those spreadsheets, and pirate entertainment. So you’re always left asking the burning question “How will this patch improve my experience with spreadsheets?” And 99.5% of the time, the answer is “It won’t”.
I think you meant to say nix lol.
Is Homebrew any good on Linux tho?
Homebrew is supported on Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora.
I use it on my recent Linux Mint install. Mint has pretty old packages or enormously bloated flatpacks, that come with limitations.
neovim only came in an ancient version, that doesn’t support lazyvim. Nicotine+ came as ancient from the Mint packages or as a 4 GB monster via flatpack.
I used Homebrew and everything installed quickly in current versions and worked like a breeze.
The great thing about Homebrew is that removing it is as easy as
rm -r /home/linuxbrewNix is great as well of course and very powerful. Can be a bit of a bitch to write all the config files though.
Well, if you’re okay using 3+ years old versions of various software…
I’ve used several distros over the years, and out of all of them, the only distro where I’ve faced zero intractible problems has been CachyOS.
Also Linux is just more mature
Step 1: ah so glad this setup is complete and fully tweaked. So let’s leave it as is.
Step 2: but then again maybe I should try out this little extra thing I just found online that might not work…
It turns out you love installing and configuring software, not actually using it.
I’m in this post and I don’t like it
I never make it to step 1
Step 1: ah so glad this setup is complete and fully tweaked. So let’s leave it as is.
Step 2: but then again maybe I should try out this little extra thing I just found online that might not work…Step 2: Why is x broken after an update!?
…
Step 99: ah so glad this setup is complete and fully tweaked. So let’s leave it as is.
Is it just me? I’ve had more issues with Linux updates than Windows updates at this point. Don’t get me started with major distro updates.
Either keep things minimal or keep the complex stuff isolated.
To me it kinda depends on what hardware/distro.
Currently running MX on multiple systems for more than a year now and it’s been pretty smooth sailing.
I do remember, however, using fedora and whatnot ages ago having exactly what you describe.
If you want something more stable you might wanna look at debian, opensuse,… (I’m sure someone more knowledgeable will complete this list). They might not be as flashy but you can depend on those and get some work done.
More than a year doesn’t sound particularly long.
I’m running LTS versions of Ubuntu server (and Windows 11 on my PC). Debian would be more stable, but then it’s so far behind that it’s a pain to use at times, especially for running any kind of game server. Ubuntu has been pretty good so far, but LTS to LTS isn’t always easy.
As someone who builds a computer, installs whatever seems like the most stable LTS distro at the time with the longest support period, and only switches to a new one when the current LTS expires, I’d like to thank all of you for being my beta testers. Your support means the world.
I installed the latest version of Pop and was shocked when like a third of the shit I wanted to find was missing. The settings page is barren. Zero VNC support out of the box, and most VNC software doesn’t even WORK! The shop is much better and faster than Pop shop… when it isn’t freezing all the time.
Reverted back to 22.x before cosmic and all the stuff I need is back, VNC is built-in, and the slower Pop Shop never freezes. Nothing freezes, it’s perfectly stable.
Cosmic looks nice but damn, the latest version of Pop is NOT there yet.
I reverted back to Mint when remote sound stopped working in Remmina.
you’re welcome mr debian user
This guy runs debian (btw)
We’ve got to come up with a different acronym. What says old and stable?
“I use Debian, lol (lots of love)”Why the face?
I once heard someone say that Debian is like the sound Dads make when getting off the couch. I’ve never felt so seen.
(I absolutely run Debian, lol)
I use Arch BTW full-time for work and personal for about 3 years now and haven’t had any issues at all.
Around 10 years here. Some issues, but much less time wasted in total than if I had done “dist-upgrade”s the whole time.
One huge advantage of a rolling distro is that generally only one thing can break at a time :)
whats dist-upgrade? this is the first time ive heard of it
It’s what Debian and similar distributions use to switch from one stable release to the next. This happens every half year for Ubuntu and every blue moon for Debian, which makes it a significantly more error-prone process than updating Arch every week in my experience.
The LTS released every other year) is supported 5 years.
Oof, that’s probably almost a full reinstall when you upgrade, depending on how stable your stack is. A lot of services will will have breaking config changes in that time frame.
I worked with someone who uses arch on his work laptop
One day it just died and he had to spend a day or two setting it all up again
I mean, its not common, but it happens
I’ve been dailying the exact same arch installation since 2014 without reinstalling it a single time.
Now to be fair I did have it non-bootable at several points. Worst of which was a PAM update which broke it completely because the new config was in a
.pacnewfile and the old one was not compatible anymore. But since it was a edge-case there was no forum post about it. Still recovered it just fine after an hour or so of troubleshooting.It’s all open-source and usually decently documented. The only reason anyone should have to reinstall a Linux desktop is lack of experience, but I would always advise to persevere because troubleshooting my system is how I gained much of my expertise. If that’s not what you want, stick to Debian.
That doesn’t happen. When it breaks, it’s always recoverable, and it very very very rarely breaks (>10 years Arch user here, never lost sleep about it)
I used to do much distro hopping coming from gentoo and settling down with endeavour. My tip for all of you: use lvm for everything outside boot, root and swap (vms, home, games). That way a complete reinstall just takes minutes.
Yeah, I ran arch through college, it broke 3 times over 4 years, basically each time because Nvidia updated. Now that I don’t have the time to fuss with spending a couple of hours chrooting in and fixing Nvidia stuff, I just swapped to endeavorOS sway community edition (and made sure none of my PCs have Nvidia anything in them) and haven’t had an issue yet.
Yep, the only time things have broken in Arch for me has been with Nvidia driver updates.
Yep. Funnily enough, never really had any issues with the drivers on a desktop, only on mobile, mostly switching between integrated and discrete. But after messing with them on my laptop for a few years, you better bet my laptop was only running Intel integrated and my desktop runs on amd.
I’d guess that keeping configs in Ansible would reduce that setup time to an hour or two.
Skill issue.
been using Artix and Arch for two years, for work and play, no issues
I think bleeding edge linux is probably more stable than windows
The only issue I ever had was Arch ARM changing the naming convention for network devices and making me have to plug the first Raspberry Pi that I upgraded into a monitor to debug what was going on.
This was annoying for sure, but less annoying than using a 6 year old Python version like the Red Hat Enterprise Linux at work…
I see your 6 year old python version and raise you RHEL5 running python 2.5 in 2022.
That thing didn’t even have a base Exception class.
Yeah, people like to think that bleeding edge means “untested”. As if your OS was directly receiving the dev’s
git push…I wonder if there’s a package manager that does just that, I want the real bleeding edge!
Portage allows that to some extent - you can make it install thr latest of everything. Depending on the ebuild, a lot of that will be straight from git. Master branch, not some random working one, mind you, but still.
Pop/cosmic let’s go!
Or could use Gentoo, only using the more unstable keywords for packages you want to be newer than old stable.
Best of both paths in one.
… Though… Do enjoy the increasing dependency wrangling, the more you mix and match.
I like Fedora for my desktop. Close enough to upstream to get the latest features, but not so bleeding edge that it’s unstable.
It’s balanced as all things should be.
I’ve really started to enjoy Kinonite. Fedora’s atomic version of KDE Plasma.
I’m wondering where people like you and me, using non-LTS but not rolling distros, go in the OP pic.
fence and then grass and then dirt and rocks
And it’s Linus’s distro of choice.
Yeah, but he has stated that he really doesn’t have an opinion. He just happened to install Fedora on the family PC a long time ago and now he neither wants to deal with two separate distros, nor switch the whole household over.
I mean that and being open enough of a distro he can change the kernel out decently often, but not so open things like throwing a new kernel in arch leads to poking at other things.
Yeah same. Its a little annoying having to wait for certain updates, like when a new application can be built from source on arch, but i’d have to rebuild a core dependency from a scratch to get it working on fedora.
But ive been using it for years, and even if i broke the system, ive always got it working again, which is saying something.
I’m on Nobara, and if the installation ever dies, i will probably install pure fedora. My previous experiences were all with debian, which drove me crazy as a gamer because when playing current games you want your system to be a lot closer to the bleeding edge of the knife - debian is more like a chain glove for holding it.
This is the way.
I use Debian testing for… 20 years? I had serious problems with it. Twice. Nothing unrepairable, but still I needed another machine with internet to fix the problem. I suppose that is ok stability-wise for 20 years.
Sounds like the exact reason that official debian backports came into existence.
