Early Ubtuntu & Mark Shuttleworth were a big part of my teens and my first real experience with a Linux Desktop and Philosophy tied to Open Source Software.
It's been fun watching Ubuntu evolve over the years and see distros like Mint evolve off of them as well.
Devil's advocate...how much do we really care about these different distros at this point. The world lives out of the browser. As long as I have chrome and VS Code I'm pretty good to go.
When your browser is shipped via a snap and is 2 versions out of date because the update mechanism sucks and has been failing silently for over a month, it makes a difference.
Firefox through snap has been the last straw for me as well. Not quite enough to ragequit on the spot, but next time I have to install a new OS, it won't be Ubuntu.
Yup, and installing Firefox via apt installs a snap as well. I manually had to add a separate apt repo for Firefox alone. I seem to have to do this more and more for things that just can't be slow on my machine.
Yep, I did the same. But I don't want to mess around with hacks like that any more, so my next distro isn't going to be Ubuntu, even though I've used some Ubuntu variant for over a decade now. I'm looking at Tumbleweed for my next distro.
I like the security/privacy promises of options like snaps. It seems like other issues, like file sizes, aren’t the worst. And getting it to match your os options seems like a solvable problem. Could somebody explain why they hate these systems?
I dislike snaps because they introduce inefficiencies and I don't want want applications to each bundle their own copies of the shared libraries they depend on. I also don't want automatic sandboxing.
Agree. OSes are practically irrelevant. The only thing I need is a web browser and a terminal with posix like commands. I can (almost) get that on Windows these days.
I’ve run Mac for 20 years now, and before that Linux for almost 10. I can’t think of anything I lost when switching beyond focus follows mouse.
One of the downfalls of Linux Desktop, besides the fragmentation, was Apple and Microsoft figuring out that a large majority wants a POSIX like experience, and aren't that deep onto GNU/Linux anyway.
There is a certain irony when the Linux Desktop is on minority when looking around laptops at FOSDEM.
I didn't care much about one distro vs another until I found a lot of packages I wanted were packaged for Arch Linux and not Ubuntu Linux, and the Arch Wiki was better than Ubuntu's docs. And also, yes "Snaps" were annoying.
Imo package managers/repos, update cycles, and installation process can still be a reasonable differentiator between distros. Admittedly these decisions are fairly minor -- most popular packages are available on the major repos and you probably aren't installing your distro every day. But even though most the time I'm just living in nvim and Firefox, if adding or changing something becomes a chore it can really expand quickly as I might avoid making a positive change to my system just because I can't overcome the initial inertia from having to bend my distro to my will. Then again, that's probably a sign that I should swallow my pride and switch from Arch to Manjaro at some point.
Good for you I guess, but most features I need aren't offered by web apps. Paradoxically, Linux is the only platform where desktop apps are the default.
Your world does, and I know that it does for many. But mine absolutely doesn't -- there isn't anything critical I use that is browser-based. And many are like me.
Fedora Workstation and especially Silverblue made Linux work for me in a way no distribution I have used before has been able to. Being bleeding edge yet stable and reliable just made it so pleasant, coming from a mix of Slitaz, Elementary and Manjaro.
Yeah, I agree (although with Kinoite because fuck GNOME). It still has plenty of issues, but at least I don't feel like I'm constantly fighting the system just to use software.
Ubuntu wasn't especially bad, it was more that Silverblue made so much sense. It fixed the issues I was having with other distros where messiness would creep into my setup over time.
I also tried NixOS, but it felt too rigid. Silverblue offered the same benefits of immutability without a loss of flexibility.
I do. I use toolboxes for pretty much all my development. I've scripted the setup each type of toolbox I use, so they can be reproduced. I use a terminal editor (neovim), but I think it's possible to run vscode from a toolbox too[1].
For graphical apps (browsers etc.) the flatpaks are very handy.
The above setup means I don't really need to layer much in the OS, mainly drivers and common terminal utilities.
Fedora isn't perfect, but it can go for weeks without updates and then update cleanly reliably, which is not something you typically get with rolling distributions. This makes it well suited for use as a dual booted secondary OS or VM OS.
The issue with Debian is how old application packages are, and I'm not really into Flatpak. Fedora's packages are pretty close in recency to what's shipping on other platforms.
Debian testing puts you in a pretty bad place in terms of security updates; you're not getting new upstream releases as quickly as unstable/experimental, but they don't do dedicated backports of security fixes like with stable.
Anecdata: I've used Arch Linux for several years and it's been probably 3-4 years since I've had any stability issues with it after upgrading. And the last time I did run into problems, it was from bugs in the open source AMD GPU drivers due to how relatively immature they were at the time.
Would I use it for a mission critical workstation or server? Probably not. But for daily personal use, it's been completely fine for me and I would highly recommend it to others.
Slightly tangential question: Is there a distro that has a stable "core" (kernel, maybe some userspace libraries) but uses rolling releases for everything else? Ideally, that would probably give you the best of both worlds for a personal machine.
> Slightly tangential question: Is there a distro that has a stable "core" (kernel, maybe some userspace libraries) but uses rolling releases for everything else? Ideally, that would probably give you the best of both worlds for a personal machine.
I'm aware this isn't exactly what you were asking for—and with the disclaimer that I spent a lot of years as a Linux desktop user, so I do have a great deal of experience with how that "half" lives, but: this is one of the things that's so nice about MacOS + Homebrew. It's a very stable core (up through and including the graphical environment—after all, if that breaks on a workstation/desktop, that's nearly as bad as the whole OS breaking) that only updates every couple years (and I can ignore the updates a long time without notable consequences) with a very-high-package-count package manager that's rolling-release on top of it, for most of the software I directly use.
I'd love to see a Linux distro that worked that way—I don't think I could go back to doing package management the typical Linux way, on my workstation. I've done rolling-release, I've done everything-stable-and-maybe-some-bodged-in-extra-repositories-for-newer-stuff, and both suck, for my needs, compared to this arrangement. Stable core + rolling applications is great, would be thrilled to see more Linux distros explore that kind of thing.
Homebrew has its issues, but yes I also like the approach of the system and the packages I install living in two entirely separate worlds, with the system being boring and stable and other packages lining up with whatever is currently shipping for Windows/macOS. The extra space consumed is negligible and well worth the turbulence reduction.
Immutable distributions like Fedora Silverblue seem to lean in that direction, though I've never used them personally.
You better love Unix to run NixOS.
I do love Unix, I was a FreeBSD fellow, but Nix is so incredible that everything else feels like poking at your hard drive with a stick.
Editing a file in /etc/ feels like PEEK/POKEing to memory now. Barbaric.
I'm super happy with Fedora for ~ 4 years. It's always one/two versions behind (currently 37) and it never gave me any problems (compared to manjaro/arch/ubuntu and few other smaller distro that I've used, but names escapes me)
Fedora seems faster than Ubuntu out of the box on the same hardware.
It's also rock solid from my experience. That may be somehow related to docker doing heavy lifting when needed. Ofc YMMV.
I found the installer was lacking something I typically wanted. Disk encryption maybe? Or maybe it’s partitioning or file system options were limited? Can’t recall. It kept me from trying it out full time at one point
Isn't Manjaro the distro that constantly fails to renew their SSL certificates, pushes security updates way too late, and distributed software that brought down the AUR a couple of times?
I have never used it myself, but from everything I've heard about it I'm kind of surprised how popular it is.
I used Arch for years but switched to Ubuntu because I got tired of coping with Arch's broken networking in the default kernels, and then they shipped a totally broken avr-gcc which prevented me from doing actual proper work.
This was a while ago, probably about ten years ago, and I've used Ubuntu ever since.
FWIW I run Debian bullseye on the desktop and don't have any issues with any of the software I use, like web browsers and IM clients.
I'm not running anything fancy locally so perhaps it's an unusual case, and I will admit that I can't print from my desktop for reasons I've never bothered to look into, so the experience isn't 100%; but I prefer it to running Windows, which is becoming more and more like an OS-as-a-service-with-ads by the day.
You deal with it by being happy that it doesn't constantly change UI/Interface/Features and break your workflow unexpectedly sometimes. Yes, you don't always have the latest and greatest and if that's a solid requirement, Debian isn't a good choice. But for a stable, not-going-to-change-out-from-under-you point of view, Debian is fantastic. Software you can rely on that's still patched for security issues.
unstable is a bit of an odd fit for most purposes. For 6 months leading up to a stable release it is frozen, so few packages are being updated, then for 6 months after a stable release there is a bunch of churn and things can get a bit unstable, and then for about a year it is like running a rolling release, albeit one that isn't as up-to-date as Arch. I feel most people who want up-to-date packages would be better off running Arch or Fedora.
It's "testing", not unstable. "Unstable" is actually unstable, and seems to be where people are actually testing things. I find the names needlessly misleading, although accurate, because "testing" is being tested to be the next "stable." "Unstable" is where people are figuring out things; they go into "testing" when they're pretty much figured out.
I've had an order of magnitude more breakage on regular Ubuntu updates than on Debian testing. That being said, I ditched Ubuntu probably a decade ago and it might go out better now.
Debian Testing doesn’t get security updates quickly, unlike Stable and Unstable. Hence why the Debian wiki does not recommend Testing for ordinary users.
Debian is really solid as a server OS. I wouldn't use it for desktop unless you're using ancient hardware. My days of using CentOS as a development workstation are thankfully behind me. I will never use a long-release cycle distro for primary development, the headaches that come with it are not worth it.
Depends on the apps. For most it's completely irrelevant whether it’s the latest release. For others, there’s flatpaks or containers (docker/podman). Personally I think people get too attached to bleeding edge.
I use Debian on the desktop with various hardware, both inside the case and outside it (various SDRs and data capture toys) and it works great for me. Just a data point, YMMV.
If you aren't worried about your system being unstable, just use testing. Or just do what everyone else does, and use testing on your laptop/workstation and stable on everything else.
Debian releases every 2 years. Each release gets LTS support for 5 years, but there is no reason you need to use it that long unless you choose not to upgrade.
I mean, if you really need newer software, then you can probably find a DPA (like Ubuntu's PPA). The PHP packages provided by Ondřej Surý come to mind as an example, which have recent versions that would otherwise be unavailable: https://deb.sury.org/
Alternatively, one can use OCI containers (e.g. Docker) for something even more recent, or software unavailable on Debian altogether. That way, you can have a very stable base server OS, with isolated bits of something more recent, feature packed, albeit sometimes a bit more unstable.
Those aren't the only options, of course, but they are pretty viable, depending on your use case. Personally, I also didn't see any issues with the ~10 year EOL of some of the RPM distros, as long as you care mostly about security updates/stability and not recent features.
What I do is that the very few apps that I want/need the most recent upstream version of (Firefox, Thunderbird, Digicam, KeepassXC), I use the AppImage version of those. (The Mozilla has some other system than AppImage, but it works really well with auto updating, etc. nonetheless)
On the off chance that I need some library, I may use a backports mirror. But I am not needing any at the moment and don't recall the last time I had to use backports. Must have been at least a couple of years since...
There is nothing to deal with, outdated software still works, it's stable and you get on with your life.
Anything of importance has deb package/official deb repo (Chrome, Brave, VS Code, Slack, Signal, Dropbox, etc), so you receive latest versions. There is flatpak as well. Newer kernel and some libraries could be found in backports repo.
I use Debian with 0 flatpaks/snaps/Appimages, only Debian repos and few official third-party ones.
There are still some reason that you may want to use a newer version of a software when your distro is stable. e.g. The latest version added a new feature that is really useful to you, or a long-standing bug has been fixed in latest version.
I think Flatpak would be current best choice for these tasks if you are running a stable distro. But I think it would be good to have a distro where core OS and user application is completely separated, and can be updated independently. It would be nice to have latest application without fearing the next grub/DE/kernel/driver/... update might break your current setup.
> I think it would be good to have a distro where core OS and user application is completely separated, and can be updated independently.
There is nuance here. Technically, this is how it currently is, since the "core OS" is the kernel, and you can absolutely update that separately from everything else.
But lots of what people tend to think of as the "OS" are just applications (in Linux, anyway), so if that's the point of view, then it gets trickier. You can still update that stuff independently, but you have to decide what parts count as "core OS" to you and you'll need to update each of them independently.
True "user applications" are updateable independently.
A Debian base with something like Homebrew on top, so all the user-facing applications are always up-to-date, would be basically perfect. Which, I know there's a Homebrew port for Linux, but it and its packages seemed rather more bug-ridden than than the Mac version, plus there were way fewer packages, last time I checked, probably because it has to support a whole bunch of underlying distros, Linux's culture around software packaging & libraries is... challenging, and there are simply a lot fewer eyeballs on it than on regular Homebrew. I think the distro itself would have to provide the separate non-system-software manager, specifically for that distro and close derivatives, for that to take off in Linux land. And it'd be a lot of work, to untangle that from underlying system software so the system packages could sit at a stable versions for months or years while the user-software updated on top of it.
[EDIT] And, yeah, I know you can probably get a similar effect with Nix, but, ah, no. I tried it in a VM a couple years back, and it's a hard no. And I was a Gentoo user for years, so I'm not necessarily averse to some pain... but no.
I couldn't tell you, but since Debian 12 is moving into Stable you can see for yourself with a apt-get full-upgrade. For a little while, you'll be as close to cutting edge as Stable gets.
I'll check. The point is that software for web development is not installed with debs but with their own package managers (rvm, npm, pip) or meta managers (asdf) or docker so I'm cutting edge no matter what I get from the distro. Same thing for browsers. I downloaded Firefox from Mozilla and it auto updates more gracefully than the deb I had in Ubuntu: it suggests a restart and doesn't force it when I open a new tab. Chrome has its own apt, I think.
About the rest of the software, it's not very important which version I have. Actually, staying for years on an older Gnome shell won't force me to spend time to adapt to or disable new weirdnesses. Libre Office from n years ago would be OK. Evince, the same. Nautilus, give me the one from 2008.
I willingly use Stable, although if you want something that includes more recent versions, you want Unstable.
Personally, there's only been one time in the last decade or so that not using the latest version of something has caused any real headache for me, and that was a manageable situation.
Debian Testing doesn’t get security updates quickly, unlike Stable and Unstable. Hence why the Debian wiki does not recommend Testing for ordinary users.
This is my approach. There's only been one or two times that I needed the latest version of something, and when that happened I just built them myself.
I haven't noticed anything grossly outdated. I have some Debian and some Ubuntu desktop machines, and honestly I couldn't tell the difference except when trying to install stable diffusion (bleeding edge software with official support for Ubuntu only).
I also used to run Debian on my server machines but switched to NixOS - although I'm now seriously considering switching back to Debian since it has far less headaches and just works.
Debian updates as often as Ubuntu LTS. And Ubuntu tries to force people into LTS (by not offering you to update to non-LTS once you get into an LTS), so most people using Ubuntu will have the same cadence of updates if they switch to Debian.
Also, things just work. There's no application that I need that needs to be absolutely using the latest version. The only apps I can think of that require this auto-update themselves, like Steam and Bitwarden (for which I use an AppImage).
Debian is pretty nice. I tried it after a new cloud provider didn't have option for Alpine Linux, which would be my first choice. Using Ubuntu had given me fear of anything related to it, so I was skeptical at first, but so far it has been a solid experience. The only thing I will never accept is services being started immediately after installing packages.
I have a devuan desktop, but it somehow self-nuked its grub.
I really, really dislike systemd, but the other desktop is a manjaro setup. It was stable for a while, but now something with logind (which is somehow related to systemd) broke.
The one reason I switched to manjaro is that the machine is shared between kids and two parents, and I wanted to be able to switch accounts from the screensaver prompt. That routinely fails now.
I really wish there was a debuggable (so, not systemd) Linux distribution where things like account switching, zoom and steam worked. Manjaro is the closest thing I've found. I wish one of the *BSD's worked for that. (I genuinely like my OpenBSD router, but I only log into it every year or so, because, well, it just works.)
You can run debian without systemd [1]. I've been running debian sid - the "unstable"/rolling development version - with sysvinit for over 3 years now and it has been a good experience.
Have you tried Alpine Linux? Fairly straightforward to set up as a desktop and no systemd (OpenRC FWIW) by default. Flatpak Steam reportedly runs fine.
All of which you described works for me in Debian, one of my laptops is also shared by the family. I believe that now systemd is so much more common that paths without it are less tested and way more prone to bugs.
Systemd was kind of a problem many many years ago while it was a new thing and still barely tested, but now it's mostly stable. Don't let your past experience impair your judgement of how things are in 2023. Everybody putting money on Linux is on systemd.
You do make a correct point, but it doesn't seem that you realise that you were responding to something that was far more snarky joke about the quality of Windows than serious idea of people switching or not based on calculator performance.
I still use (K)Ubuntu desktop, but for servers I feel Centos Stream 9 is best choice for a homelab at the moment. Debian is also good. What these two distros have over Ubuntu, is easy and clear documentation. Ubuntu Server adds so much noise, they are changing too many things over the years. Network configuration documentation is a mess. I'm tired of googling for an example thats updated. For Centos I easily find examples that includes how to configure network services correctly with SELinux. Extra security without time wasted is good!
I see all of this complaining about snaps and the "direction" Canonical takes as a purity constest. Yes, Snaps can be annoying (it isn't in my case). Yes, Canonical is far from perfect.
The Snap hate is really overblown. I'm using some to work daily and, apart from the annoying notification that appears far less than before (like once by a blue moon now on my system), they work exactly like .deb files.
Every OS suck in their own specific way. Fix the problems or move on to your new and shiny evergreen OS.
I don't think it is so much the snaps that are the problem, but that it is hard to get around them. I choose not to use snaps (or would like to choose that), but I find I am constantly fighting them. Why do I have a mount of some snap thing? Why does Firefox have to be a snap? I have enough things to know about without having to learn about snaps. sigh. So I am moving away from Ubuntu after years of being a happy user. It is not a hate thing, it is because either the choice to use snaps is not mine or because I am too stupid to know how to get rid of them.
What are you constantly fighting with snaps about? What snaps are you using that are so broken that you have to fight with it? I mean that seriously. I've never had this experience and I've used Ubuntu for ~15 years.
Not the poster you're responding to, but I am finding it very hard to use Firefox on my Ubuntu 22.04 laptop consistently ever since it started prompting me to install the snap version.
The snap wouldn't install, I couldn't figure out how to make it work, it seemed to get stuck trying to mount something from some unspecified device. I needed Firefox to keep working, but was forced to stop work to figure out what was broken. Decided to go around it.
Went to some unofficial mozilla PPA with "apt" incantations to force the apt version to take precedence. This version also mysteriously stops upgrading when the snap version becomes newer, or something. I am forced to reinstall it periodically. Possibly a Firefox packaging bug, or maybe I'm not clever enough to understand the interdependencies between apt and snap.
The whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth. I don't want to debug this snap thing that I never asked for. I feel like I am dealing with some corporation, not open source software. As soon as I get some down time, I'll say bye-bye to Ubuntu.
I see what Ubuntu is doing. I understand what they're doing as a business, and I don't like it and have every right to criticize it for what it is. Ubuntu built their brand on the promise of free and open source and then more and more cozied up to Microsoft and an "us only" way of doing things.
They are free to do that and I understand why as a business. But I'm also just as free to call it out and say I don't like it and steer people away from that sad story.
> I see all of this complaining about snaps and the "direction" Canonical takes as a purity constest. Yes, Snaps can be annoying (it isn't in my case). Yes, Canonical is far from perfect.
I don't care about "purity," I care about "annoying." If you acknowledge that some of Ubuntu's business decisions create annoyances, why dismiss people who just want their computers to work as being irrational?
I've been using Regolith (Ubuntu + well-integrated i3) happily for a while, but the Snap moves from Ubuntu are a massive turn-off.
Looks like Regolith can in theory be installed on top of Pop!_OS which seems to target the same audience while going in a more sensible direction. Anybody tried that combo, or have any feedback on PopOS in general?
I found Regolith nice to use except for the configuration. It seems to split the configuration into a bunch of files rather than just a standard i3 config file.
If you're coming from "Ubuntu was what I needed but sucks with recent decisions" have you thought about using popOs with a different desktop environment? (like xfce, or KDE)
My experience is you get what Ubuntu used to have that way, i.e. no thrills reliability, so would definitely recommend it
I made the same switch for the same reasons about three years ago. I have no regrets!
Also, as a CS teacher I've been forcing about 80 students to run Manjaro KDE full-time. The complaining is not nearly as loud as one would imagine. :-)
Arch Linux is a meme but also a really solid distro. I'm writing this from a 2+ year old Arch install that has had basically 0 stability issues. "Rolling release" gets an undeserved bad reputation in my opinion, and many arch packages aren't as bleeding edge as you'd expect.
Compared to Ubuntu where I'd often have major issues in between releases, I don't think I could ever go back.
I moved to Arch last week because I did not have a USB drive large enough for the new Ubuntu install iso and they did not provide a net installer either (it is a new PC). The silliest reason, but now I find Arch lovely and everything works for me (including typically fragile things). Weird how such a silly thing led to switching away after 15 years as an Ubuntu user.
Same here, every system is different, but my main desktop Arch installation is kicking since 6 years now with absolute minimal maintenance issues. Perhaps 1-2 times per year maximum things need to be fixed manually in super rare cases.
Arch has been working great for me on both my ancient laptop and my Ryzen PC for ages now. And whenever I do run into a problem or want to learn something new, I've always got the truly excellent Arch Wiki to back me up. Even those running a different distribution will often refer to it to solve a problem.
I expect even greater things from Arch in the future with Valve's use of this distro on the Steam Deck.
I've been running Arch for about a decade now and it's only seriously broken a few (low single digits) times. Here are the main failure modes I've experienced:
The biggest one seems to be something related to the package mirrors only partially updating, or updates of common dependencies not being atomically applied to all packages - something like that. If you do a pacman -Syu in the middle of the critical time period, the system will fail to work with some core libs (libc, libicu) not being compatible. Booting into a recovery session and doing pacman -Syu again fixes it. However, it's been years since I experienced this - maybe they've taken some steps to eliminate this failure mode?
The other big (but still rare) failure mode is bugs in the kernel. The fix is simple, keep linux-lts installed alongside the standard linux kernel, so you can always boot into lts from the bootloader if the regular kernel doesn't work.
User software can have bugs in newer releases, but they're usually minor - you'll still be able to get work done without much disruption. And that's not really an Arch issue. Unless the bug is reported & fixed very quickly, Ubuntu/Fedora are likely to also get the buggy versions, just later.
Aside from the first failure mode, the OS itself doesn't fail. I've had bad experiences with upgrading between major releases of distros like Ubuntu. They're bloated to begin with, and accumulate more cruft over time and major upgrades. Arch just works. Plus, there's lots of software in the official repos, and the AUR / package build system is also excellent - far superior to the whole PPA mess on Debian/Ubuntu, and the equivalent on Fedora.
>User software can have bugs in newer releases, but they're usually minor - you'll still be able to get work done without much disruption. And that's not really an Arch issue. Unless the bug is reported & fixed very quickly, Ubuntu/Fedora are likely to also get the buggy versions, just later.
And this is the thing people ignore when they say they have no issues with cutting edge (not necessarily rolling release, which can be stable) distributions. Note that I'm not egging on you, if you're happy with the way your system works and manages software updates there's nothing wrong with that.
The software that makes up the distribution is as critical as the distribution itself. When you use cutting edge software you roll along with the issues new software introduces as soon as they're introduced. This has a plethora of effects including temporary breakage, feature removal that gets later reconsidered, config files that no longer work (or do different things) from one day to the next, and similar things.
While stable distributions do eventually inherit the software anyway, they generally do so at a later patch release. They'll go from 2.3.6 to 2.3.7 while waiting for the newest 2.4.0 release to get itself together. When necessary, downstream patches are used to apply fixes from newer releases without directly upgrading to a whole new version. This makes for a much slower rate of change in general, and as such a much slower rate of breakage. One can work around a specific set of bugs, but when that set of bugs changes every other day, that's harder and more time consuming to deal with.
Personally I prefer this latter approach, mostly as it allows me to choose when things may break (i.e. when upgrading between releases). Gentoo is currently the distro that provides me this choice, allowing me to pick between stable and bleeding edge releases on a per-package basis, hold back updates without causing library linking issues, and allowing me to install packages without syncing the entire repository and upgrading everything. This allows me to set some time apart to upgrade my system and be able to deal with whatever broke this time.
My system's most recent breakage came in the form of adwaita-icon-theme removing all the remaining non-symbolic icons, causing some programs to now lack their icons.
I use arch for my personal machines and work gives me debian. Yes, there are bugs, i usually see them (a lot of them are obvious in KDE) on arch from month 0 to month 1, then if I'm unlucky (depending on when the bug appeared) I'm stuck with them from month 6 to month 12 on my work machine. Very "stable" indeed, it just means I get to see some bugs for much longer and on a delayed time table. It's very rare that anyone goes back and fixes minor bugs like these in the delayed debian packages. Just because something is released on a slower cadence with a bigger delay to release doesn't mean it has fewer bugs.
On the other hand, I had way more instances of a broken system and broken packages (where synaptic/apt just refuses to install anything) on my work computer that has debian than I ever had with arch.
> "Rolling release" gets an undeserved bad reputation in my opinion
Totally undeserved IME.
For me, Arch and Manjaro, both rolling, have always been more stable than Ubuntu has ever been. At this point, I've used all three for about an equal amount of time (~2 years). On Ubuntu, 4ish years ago, my DE and stuff crashed a LOT. Hardly ever happened on either Manjaro or Arch.
It makes some kind of sense: DE devs, for example, are banging away on the latest version of their software. They'll even ask you to upgrade your DE to the latest version to see if you can reproduce an issue you found on an older version for whatever your Ubuntu snapshot is using. Paradoxically, newer software seems to have less bugs.
Arch is my ideal distro, but since my motherboards started using UEFI I just haven't been able to install it. I followed the instructions from the Install Wiki[0], but just couldn't figure it out. Manjaro's been a nice in-between with a painless installation process
That may be a good idea, but I honestly haven't looked into it. My preference is for operating systems to just work, rather than me change all my motherboards to accommodate them
Arch does "just work" it's more of an issue with booting from a live image you are encountering by the sounds of things. Ironically your preferred OS is derivative of Arch and considered less stable by many users of both systems.
I ran Arch for about six months back in 2021 on a Thinkpad. As I recall the mouse driver would reset like once a day. I'd be mousing around and suddenly the pointer would teleport to the top-left corner. And the wifi would intermittently slow way down until I restart it.
So I switched to Ubuntu. And the wifi troubles continued. But the mouse troubles went away.
Using Arch is a dream compared to things like Ubuntu for me. PPAs and release cycles made upgrades awkward on Ubuntu. I've been a user for 3 years on my work laptop and have had everything be almost completely painless. (One time yay broke something and a python module had to be removed lol)
Arch works fine but sometimes I think I might prefer something like Debian Stable + Flatpak because the repos are frozen. Since Arch doesn't support partial upgrades, you have to upgrade the whole system every time a repo list refresh is required, basically. So some days after the last upgrade, some package you want to install is bumped, and a repo refresh list is required, which wouldn't be a problem in Debian. But Arch is rock solid and the AUR for obscure packages is something Debian doesn't have. I might be wrong about this opinion about partial upgrades etc, somebody let me know.
I may need to trailblaze development on a Linux VM at a new job because my rural DSL isn't up to the task of doing everything on my local MacBook like all the other devs. I have a lot of experience with Arch on desktops and laptops. I was leaning towards Ubuntu just due to a vague sense that "more of the important stuff will 'just work' " but do you think Arch might be a better call?
I'm really irritated by Arch's meme status, because it's genuinely a solid distro and out of all the weird Linux workstations I've spun up over the years, my Arch workstations have given me the least trouble. Manjaro, being Arch with batteries included, is an excellent starting point.
Honestly the most useful thing about Arch is the documentation. The Arch Wiki is a fantastic resource for all sorts of common Linux utilities, worth a read even if you use a different distro.
Many people don't realize that Arch is basically just providing the latest stable release from upstreams, nothing more and nothing less.
Most projects do testing before making a release of course, and for lots of software releases are very reliable. The kernel is an example of this, where Arch packages the most recent "stable" kernel rather than sticking to an LTS version. There is nothing "unstable" about this, in the sense of "unstable" meaning unreliable or buggy.
The key thing is that "stable" and "unstable" have practically nothing to do with the quality or reliability of the distro. Unstable only means that the packages may update in non-backwards compatible ways, so you need to be prepared to make changes to accommodate that. Normally it's something like updating a configuration file, or passing different flags to a command line program, or something along those lines. Maybe you run some sort of service that links to shared libraries on the system, you need to be prepared to relink to updated versions or not depend on system-wide versions at all.
So long as you make sure to keep up with changes, rolling release distros are exactly as reliable as upstream releases.
The other thing to note is that tracking releases may actually end up being more reliable, because you are constantly getting bug fixes and improvements!
The word "stable" can have different meanings, e.g. stable behavior/stable interfaces. I am using arch/manjaro on my personal machine, but I installed Debian for some of my remote family members (who mostly just need firefox+libreoffice+vlc+cups) since this makes me confident that they can get periodic security updates and bugfixes all by themselves without needing my intervention (while rolling releases sometimes require some adjustments or troubleshooting e.g. on the config files, etc).
Writing from a Arch system I installed on 2017-12-04 and use as my daily driver, I've been moving the hard drive from laptop to laptop over time and the system from drive to drive when upgrading. Prior to that, I had been using Gentoo for years which is also great.
I installed Ubuntu on my local server at home. A few weeks later I had issues with installing packages because Snap was enabled by default. I don't know what was configured wrong on my server but I managed to install 2 versions of the same firefox package from Snap, one using snap and the other using apt.
It broke the whole system so I decided to just remove snaps as a whole.
I run Arch Linux daily since 2019 and the only problems I had that I can remember are setting up dual-GPU on laptops and dealing with dual boot issues - whenever my laptop had a BIOS update on Windows, my BIOS settings would be reverted to the default, so the F1-12 keys acted as fn keys by default (e.g. pressing F5 wouldn't refresh a web page), Windows overwrote the bootloader on my boot partition so I had to reinstall GRUB/systemd-boot every time this happened and it also changed the SATA mode for the laptop which made it impossible to locate the Linux partition on my HDD unless I switched it back to AHCI (default was Intel RST + Optane).
The other issue I recently had with Arch which I think it's more related to the software and not the distro itself is that occasionally my Latte Dock will crash, but that's about it.
If you have the stomach for starting from nothing and installing only what you need, Alpine is wonderful. It uses musl libc so there are some things you need flatpaks for, but the vast majority of stuff I've tried just works, and it's small enough that the entire OS is comprehensible to a mere mortal.
I'm also using Alpine, but 100% of binary distributions of software I've tried have failed to run. Even AppImages don't run on Alpine, due to lack of glibc. It's honestly pretty frustrating--though I don't blame Alpine for this!
As a mitigation, I use Nix to run anything that isn't packaged for Alpine (e.g. Deno), and that actually works pretty well, but having a parallel set of libraries kind of defeats my whole purpose for running Alpine, namely a having trim system without any bloat (on a netbook with 1 GB of RAM).
Yeah, I've found just using Nix on Alpine for glibc-dependent stuff to be the simplest workflow.
Note that, in my case, I'm not using Alpine for the "user experience", but solely because it is the most lightweight distribution (important when running on a machine with 1 GB of RAM). I was able to set up a C programming environment on a Raspberry Pi in only 300 MB... of disk space, not RAM! :)
1. NVidia seem to love debian/ubuntu more that other distros, and in general I don't want to waste much time with setting up machine learning env/CUDA on my machines
2. work has debian based distro, so using same tool/mindset is convenient
but I really want to get rid of it because of snaps and overall attitute (previous controversies with their unity desktop manager, ads in it etc). I kind of didn't cared much then as I switched to Mint linux (even that had different distro names to annoy when need to set nvidia) and went back then ubuntu + i3. Right now it seems it's time to ditch ubuntu completely.
> but I really want to get rid of it because of snaps
If you want something on the desktop that is close enough to Ubuntu but without the snaps, you might want to have a look at Linux Mint: https://linuxmint.com/
Or some might also just use Debian with a desktop environment installed, there's not too many reasons to not do that.
I've dabbled with various flavors of Linux for a few years. Started with Ubuntu in college, then ran Linux Mint for about 6 months on my gaming rig before giving up and going back to Windows.
Most recently, I had Manjaro running on my Thinkpad for about 3 years before I wiped it and put W10 on it for my fiancee. Since getting a Steam Deck I've been eyeballing Linux on the desktop again, having seen firsthand how well Proton works.
Having effectively been a Linux baby 3 times, I have to say Manjaro was everything I thought Ubuntu would be when I tried it. I remember Ubuntu being intractable, hard to use, and weird to update. Manjaro seemed almost effortless to use, and honestly I'd probably recommend it to a Windows user over any other offerings at the current juncture.
Over a year ago, I switched to an M1 Max 14-inch as my main computer from an AMD Renoir equipped laptop running Fedora Silverblue with Pantheon. Previously used MacOS from Snow Leopard to Yosemite and very much liked it back then.
Everyone of course is going to have different experiences, but I continue to be disappointed how issue ridden MacOS Ventura has been for me. My Fedora laptop could run for weeks without the need for a reboot (honestly only necessary because I used Silverblue which is immutable), whereas my Macbook constantly has issues adjusting scaling when plugging in a monitor during sleep (necessitating logging out and in), or randomly failing to connect to any WiFi connection after waking up, requiring a full reboot around three times a week.
The settings app is appalling too, I genuinely am flabbergasted how sluggish (as in not loading settings pages for multiple seconds) it can be, especially considering the hardware. Very rarely, Xcode will try to open even though I set VSCode as the default for that file type, but this may be user error (though I don't see what else I can do beyond click that tick). Also, though this is more their design than a fault, I have become far to reliant on dnf via toolbox and whilst I am thankful for Homebrew, I can't stop feeling that a more integrated package manager would make MacOS more usable. Worst of all though is how MacOS handles USB peripherals. Upon plugging in, it should ask for confirmation, a good idea in theory. But for me, no matter the device (printer, usb drive, hub, display), this confirmation window only appears for a split second before disappearing. I then have to unplug and replug the cable about five times before, for some magic reason, the confirmation window stays upon permanently and I can actually interact with it. I tried a fresh install and spend a bit of time on the phone with customer support, neither helped. Simply cannot see MacOS as the choice for someone who needs to rely on their machine in this state.
I'm constantly testing the Asahi Fedora Remix[0] and cannot wait for that to be at a level where I can use it day-to-day. The hardware is amazing, but the software really needs to be improved.
I bet if you looked on a MacOS tweaker forum you'd find just as much attention paid to nonsense tuning. And if anything I'd say MacOS is more likely to pull the rug out from under you than Ubuntu, they're pretty aggressive about droping backward compatibility for things.
> Instead I’m solidly confident that macOS as a daily driver is the right choice for a busy developer who doesn’t want to mess with stuff.
This is true in the way you intend it, but also in a way that you don't.
Yes, macOS "just works" for most stuff--so you don't have to mess with it.
However, if you hit one of those things that does not just work, you can't mess with it so you still don't have to mess with it.
(Yes, I have hit them and they were enough to make me leave the macOS system. USB and Bluetooth are perennial frustrations for me with macOS and there are active threads with dozens of pages of complaints--so it isn't just me.)
As a Debian user who would never buy an Apple product, the amount of time I've spent troubleshooting Macs for coworkers who thought they were a ticket to not understanding how their computers worked is absurd. And the proportion of those failures that lead to an Apple support thread where dozens of people were being ignored or gaslit by Apple support is probably a third.
I made the same move a few years ago and honestly never looked back. Manjaro might have its warts, but it works really well, has an active community, and gives almost all the advantages of Arch (the AUR is amazing!) for "cowards" like me. Manjaro "just worked" and it has been extremely easy to roll with the updates since install. I have since migrated other machines to Manjaro happily.
Every time I end up on the Ubuntu machine: "sudo apt install somet<tab><tab>" nothing. Urgh. Off I go to Google "install <package> Ubuntu" and visit some third party website for a .deb.
If I wanted to circumvent the packaging system by default, I'd use Windows.
Our realities must be very different; I have never had to side-load a .deb. I honestly didn't even consider that tab-completion on apt might be a thing; I usually search with grep for what I want, but I've never not had something be there.
Proper Binary Chrome (not Chromium), Minecraft, MS Edge, and I'm sure there was something else I needed to install recently where I needed to download a .deb and run "sudo dpkg -i <thing>"
Okay, I don't *need* to install Minecraft, but I like it.
Yes, Edge works just great on Linux, probably better than it does on Windows.
I am not a typical Linux user. I have been doing weird and unsupported shit with it since kernel 0.93 and I know what I'm getting into before I unscrew the lid.
I don't want snaps anywhere. Definitely not on the server (ever looked how much RAM it takes on a machine with 512MB - 1GB of RAM?) and also not on the desktop.
I don't have to optimise my machine to get the calculator run within 1-2 seconds, this is just bad by design and there is no excuse.
They are an abomination or workaround for problems in OS library packaging (& manager) and OS security concepts.
If snaps are so cool why are there no similar concepts in other famous major desktops (even non Linux)?
There are similar concepts: I use flatpak on other distros. It is just that flatpaks are not remotely as invasive and inconsistent as snaps (and probably most importantly, not forced on you).
> If snaps are so cool why are there no similar concepts in other famous major desktops (even non Linux)?
APKs are pretty much the Android equivalent. In both cases the key features are sandboxing and bundling of dependencies. The stores also work roughly equivalently - like with snaps you can install an APK without a store, and that mechanism is what alternative stores use, but for full integration there's really just one: the Google Play Store.
iOS works pretty much the same way too, as far as I understand.
Maybe ten years ago I jumped from Ubuntu to Fedora, can't remember why - just wanted to shake things up maybe? This year I installed Mint on my main machine. Contemplating a switch to Debian 12 when it's out - but might not bother, Mint has been really nice.
What drove me from Fedora was mostly the need to upgrade every 6 months, and the short support windows.
My only problems with Mint is that I don't care about Cinnamon, and when things go wrong the only forum that will help you with that particular frankendebian is the Mint forum, which is woefully inadequate. If you want to quickly fix what's broken, Arch, Debian, and Fedora are aces, everything else is trouble imo.
> My daily driver is a middle-aged Dell laptop, it’s about five years old but because I invested in the highest spec I could at the time, with an i7 of the day and 16 gigabytes of memory it’s still a contender.
I like how they need to defend themselves for using a 5 year old laptop.
What? A top spec 5 year old (2018) laptop should be plenty fast for most common desktop use.
I have a 2016 Dell latitude laying around with Debian 11 on it. It is plenty fast for most things. Even running virtual machines in virtual box with gaming (mostly older Windows games I run in a WinXP VM)
How's the battery life on that 10-year-old laptop?
The big improvement with modern laptops isn't compute power, it's energy efficiency and thus battery life, and also weight. Modern laptops are a lot easier to carry than 10-year-old models since they weigh a fraction as much.
Depends. I have a t430 that with the right distro last like 4 to 6 hours depending on usage.
It's a chunky laptop, but gets me going when I travel to a place where security can be iffy. So looks like an old VCR, and get less attention than an apple logo.
240 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadEarly Ubtuntu & Mark Shuttleworth were a big part of my teens and my first real experience with a Linux Desktop and Philosophy tied to Open Source Software.
It's been fun watching Ubuntu evolve over the years and see distros like Mint evolve off of them as well.
There's my personal anecdote.
Exactly: my productive environment is «out of the browser» and I want it to be as fitting as possible, for my efficiency and comfort.
I’ve run Mac for 20 years now, and before that Linux for almost 10. I can’t think of anything I lost when switching beyond focus follows mouse.
Others might too, those are the only two I have experience with though.
There is a certain irony when the Linux Desktop is on minority when looking around laptops at FOSDEM.
Your world does, and I know that it does for many. But mine absolutely doesn't -- there isn't anything critical I use that is browser-based. And many are like me.
Different strokes and all that.
Ubuntu wasn't especially bad, it was more that Silverblue made so much sense. It fixed the issues I was having with other distros where messiness would creep into my setup over time.
I also tried NixOS, but it felt too rigid. Silverblue offered the same benefits of immutability without a loss of flexibility.
For graphical apps (browsers etc.) the flatpaks are very handy.
The above setup means I don't really need to layer much in the OS, mainly drivers and common terminal utilities.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/107lvlf/silverblue_...
I use a combination of toolbox, distrobox, flatpak, docker, homebrew, junest and custom bwrap scripts.
It makes perfect sense to me that you’d feel that Fedora struck a better balance for you.
Many people prefer Debian based distros. Some people use Debian on the desktop because they prefer less frequent updates (among other reasons).
I’m just stating the obvious here, really.
Would I use it for a mission critical workstation or server? Probably not. But for daily personal use, it's been completely fine for me and I would highly recommend it to others.
Slightly tangential question: Is there a distro that has a stable "core" (kernel, maybe some userspace libraries) but uses rolling releases for everything else? Ideally, that would probably give you the best of both worlds for a personal machine.
I'm aware this isn't exactly what you were asking for—and with the disclaimer that I spent a lot of years as a Linux desktop user, so I do have a great deal of experience with how that "half" lives, but: this is one of the things that's so nice about MacOS + Homebrew. It's a very stable core (up through and including the graphical environment—after all, if that breaks on a workstation/desktop, that's nearly as bad as the whole OS breaking) that only updates every couple years (and I can ignore the updates a long time without notable consequences) with a very-high-package-count package manager that's rolling-release on top of it, for most of the software I directly use.
I'd love to see a Linux distro that worked that way—I don't think I could go back to doing package management the typical Linux way, on my workstation. I've done rolling-release, I've done everything-stable-and-maybe-some-bodged-in-extra-repositories-for-newer-stuff, and both suck, for my needs, compared to this arrangement. Stable core + rolling applications is great, would be thrilled to see more Linux distros explore that kind of thing.
Immutable distributions like Fedora Silverblue seem to lean in that direction, though I've never used them personally.
Editing a file in /etc/ feels like PEEK/POKEing to memory now. Barbaric.
I have never used it myself, but from everything I've heard about it I'm kind of surprised how popular it is.
This was a while ago, probably about ten years ago, and I've used Ubuntu ever since.
A few years ago I moved back from Ubuntu to Debian and couldn't be happier.
I'm not running anything fancy locally so perhaps it's an unusual case, and I will admit that I can't print from my desktop for reasons I've never bothered to look into, so the experience isn't 100%; but I prefer it to running Windows, which is becoming more and more like an OS-as-a-service-with-ads by the day.
I've had an order of magnitude more breakage on regular Ubuntu updates than on Debian testing. That being said, I ditched Ubuntu probably a decade ago and it might go out better now.
I'm running Debian 12 (since the soft freeze I think) on my newly built AMD 7700X. I wouldn't exactly call that "ancient hardware".
Zero issue. No headaches for me. FWIW I'm running Debian since Debian 1.1 (1.1, not 11).
Alternatively, one can use OCI containers (e.g. Docker) for something even more recent, or software unavailable on Debian altogether. That way, you can have a very stable base server OS, with isolated bits of something more recent, feature packed, albeit sometimes a bit more unstable.
Those aren't the only options, of course, but they are pretty viable, depending on your use case. Personally, I also didn't see any issues with the ~10 year EOL of some of the RPM distros, as long as you care mostly about security updates/stability and not recent features.
On the off chance that I need some library, I may use a backports mirror. But I am not needing any at the moment and don't recall the last time I had to use backports. Must have been at least a couple of years since...
Anything of importance has deb package/official deb repo (Chrome, Brave, VS Code, Slack, Signal, Dropbox, etc), so you receive latest versions. There is flatpak as well. Newer kernel and some libraries could be found in backports repo.
I use Debian with 0 flatpaks/snaps/Appimages, only Debian repos and few official third-party ones.
I think Flatpak would be current best choice for these tasks if you are running a stable distro. But I think it would be good to have a distro where core OS and user application is completely separated, and can be updated independently. It would be nice to have latest application without fearing the next grub/DE/kernel/driver/... update might break your current setup.
There is nuance here. Technically, this is how it currently is, since the "core OS" is the kernel, and you can absolutely update that separately from everything else.
But lots of what people tend to think of as the "OS" are just applications (in Linux, anyway), so if that's the point of view, then it gets trickier. You can still update that stuff independently, but you have to decide what parts count as "core OS" to you and you'll need to update each of them independently.
True "user applications" are updateable independently.
[EDIT] And, yeah, I know you can probably get a similar effect with Nix, but, ah, no. I tried it in a VM a couple years back, and it's a hard no. And I was a Gentoo user for years, so I'm not necessarily averse to some pain... but no.
About the rest of the software, it's not very important which version I have. Actually, staying for years on an older Gnome shell won't force me to spend time to adapt to or disable new weirdnesses. Libre Office from n years ago would be OK. Evince, the same. Nautilus, give me the one from 2008.
Personally, there's only been one time in the last decade or so that not using the latest version of something has caused any real headache for me, and that was a manageable situation.
You want Testing. I don't think people really use Unstable unless they work on Debian itself.
Use the Source, Luke.
If there's something too shiny that I really need on my Debian, I compile it from source.
For example Emacs 29, with tree-sitter and whatnots, is just too shiny. So I compile it from source.
I also used to run Debian on my server machines but switched to NixOS - although I'm now seriously considering switching back to Debian since it has far less headaches and just works.
Also, things just work. There's no application that I need that needs to be absolutely using the latest version. The only apps I can think of that require this auto-update themselves, like Steam and Bitwarden (for which I use an AppImage).
I really, really dislike systemd, but the other desktop is a manjaro setup. It was stable for a while, but now something with logind (which is somehow related to systemd) broke.
The one reason I switched to manjaro is that the machine is shared between kids and two parents, and I wanted to be able to switch accounts from the screensaver prompt. That routinely fails now.
I really wish there was a debuggable (so, not systemd) Linux distribution where things like account switching, zoom and steam worked. Manjaro is the closest thing I've found. I wish one of the *BSD's worked for that. (I genuinely like my OpenBSD router, but I only log into it every year or so, because, well, it just works.)
[1] https://wiki.debian.org/Init
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Steam
Systemd was kind of a problem many many years ago while it was a new thing and still barely tested, but now it's mostly stable. Don't let your past experience impair your judgement of how things are in 2023. Everybody putting money on Linux is on systemd.
It's such an odd technical choice that makes snap look bad for a few megs.
Rocky Linux?
The Snap hate is really overblown. I'm using some to work daily and, apart from the annoying notification that appears far less than before (like once by a blue moon now on my system), they work exactly like .deb files.
Every OS suck in their own specific way. Fix the problems or move on to your new and shiny evergreen OS.
The snap wouldn't install, I couldn't figure out how to make it work, it seemed to get stuck trying to mount something from some unspecified device. I needed Firefox to keep working, but was forced to stop work to figure out what was broken. Decided to go around it.
Went to some unofficial mozilla PPA with "apt" incantations to force the apt version to take precedence. This version also mysteriously stops upgrading when the snap version becomes newer, or something. I am forced to reinstall it periodically. Possibly a Firefox packaging bug, or maybe I'm not clever enough to understand the interdependencies between apt and snap.
The whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth. I don't want to debug this snap thing that I never asked for. I feel like I am dealing with some corporation, not open source software. As soon as I get some down time, I'll say bye-bye to Ubuntu.
I see what Ubuntu is doing. I understand what they're doing as a business, and I don't like it and have every right to criticize it for what it is. Ubuntu built their brand on the promise of free and open source and then more and more cozied up to Microsoft and an "us only" way of doing things.
They are free to do that and I understand why as a business. But I'm also just as free to call it out and say I don't like it and steer people away from that sad story.
(MX Linux is what I'm rolling with for now.)
I don't care about "purity," I care about "annoying." If you acknowledge that some of Ubuntu's business decisions create annoyances, why dismiss people who just want their computers to work as being irrational?
> Every OS suck in their own specific way.
This is the law of averages. It is not a law.
Looks like Regolith can in theory be installed on top of Pop!_OS which seems to target the same audience while going in a more sensible direction. Anybody tried that combo, or have any feedback on PopOS in general?
I have had some trouble with the Pop Shop leaking memory, freezing, and crashing, but you can disable it and use Gnome Software if you want a gui.
I tried Nix but couldn't figure out how to install some software I needed (dealt with plugins).
I tried Manjaro but the system was unbootable after a software update soon after install and I just don't want to fight problems like that anymore.
I've been using Mint but recently am giving PopOs a try but they've not fixed enough of the Gnome 3 usability problems.
Been a deb used for decades at this point but maybe I'll give Fedora a try next, either going with XFCE (like I did with Mint) or KDE.
My experience is you get what Ubuntu used to have that way, i.e. no thrills reliability, so would definitely recommend it
Also, as a CS teacher I've been forcing about 80 students to run Manjaro KDE full-time. The complaining is not nearly as loud as one would imagine. :-)
Compared to Ubuntu where I'd often have major issues in between releases, I don't think I could ever go back.
I expect even greater things from Arch in the future with Valve's use of this distro on the Steam Deck.
The biggest one seems to be something related to the package mirrors only partially updating, or updates of common dependencies not being atomically applied to all packages - something like that. If you do a pacman -Syu in the middle of the critical time period, the system will fail to work with some core libs (libc, libicu) not being compatible. Booting into a recovery session and doing pacman -Syu again fixes it. However, it's been years since I experienced this - maybe they've taken some steps to eliminate this failure mode?
The other big (but still rare) failure mode is bugs in the kernel. The fix is simple, keep linux-lts installed alongside the standard linux kernel, so you can always boot into lts from the bootloader if the regular kernel doesn't work.
User software can have bugs in newer releases, but they're usually minor - you'll still be able to get work done without much disruption. And that's not really an Arch issue. Unless the bug is reported & fixed very quickly, Ubuntu/Fedora are likely to also get the buggy versions, just later.
Aside from the first failure mode, the OS itself doesn't fail. I've had bad experiences with upgrading between major releases of distros like Ubuntu. They're bloated to begin with, and accumulate more cruft over time and major upgrades. Arch just works. Plus, there's lots of software in the official repos, and the AUR / package build system is also excellent - far superior to the whole PPA mess on Debian/Ubuntu, and the equivalent on Fedora.
And this is the thing people ignore when they say they have no issues with cutting edge (not necessarily rolling release, which can be stable) distributions. Note that I'm not egging on you, if you're happy with the way your system works and manages software updates there's nothing wrong with that.
The software that makes up the distribution is as critical as the distribution itself. When you use cutting edge software you roll along with the issues new software introduces as soon as they're introduced. This has a plethora of effects including temporary breakage, feature removal that gets later reconsidered, config files that no longer work (or do different things) from one day to the next, and similar things.
While stable distributions do eventually inherit the software anyway, they generally do so at a later patch release. They'll go from 2.3.6 to 2.3.7 while waiting for the newest 2.4.0 release to get itself together. When necessary, downstream patches are used to apply fixes from newer releases without directly upgrading to a whole new version. This makes for a much slower rate of change in general, and as such a much slower rate of breakage. One can work around a specific set of bugs, but when that set of bugs changes every other day, that's harder and more time consuming to deal with.
Personally I prefer this latter approach, mostly as it allows me to choose when things may break (i.e. when upgrading between releases). Gentoo is currently the distro that provides me this choice, allowing me to pick between stable and bleeding edge releases on a per-package basis, hold back updates without causing library linking issues, and allowing me to install packages without syncing the entire repository and upgrading everything. This allows me to set some time apart to upgrade my system and be able to deal with whatever broke this time.
My system's most recent breakage came in the form of adwaita-icon-theme removing all the remaining non-symbolic icons, causing some programs to now lack their icons.
On the other hand, I had way more instances of a broken system and broken packages (where synaptic/apt just refuses to install anything) on my work computer that has debian than I ever had with arch.
Totally undeserved IME.
For me, Arch and Manjaro, both rolling, have always been more stable than Ubuntu has ever been. At this point, I've used all three for about an equal amount of time (~2 years). On Ubuntu, 4ish years ago, my DE and stuff crashed a LOT. Hardly ever happened on either Manjaro or Arch.
It makes some kind of sense: DE devs, for example, are banging away on the latest version of their software. They'll even ask you to upgrade your DE to the latest version to see if you can reproduce an issue you found on an older version for whatever your Ubuntu snapshot is using. Paradoxically, newer software seems to have less bugs.
[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide
So I switched to Ubuntu. And the wifi troubles continued. But the mouse troubles went away.
Perhaps I'd have a better time with a desktop.
That stable base I don’t have to worry about plus up to date apps is living the dream, as far as I’m concerned.
Honestly the most useful thing about Arch is the documentation. The Arch Wiki is a fantastic resource for all sorts of common Linux utilities, worth a read even if you use a different distro.
Most projects do testing before making a release of course, and for lots of software releases are very reliable. The kernel is an example of this, where Arch packages the most recent "stable" kernel rather than sticking to an LTS version. There is nothing "unstable" about this, in the sense of "unstable" meaning unreliable or buggy.
The key thing is that "stable" and "unstable" have practically nothing to do with the quality or reliability of the distro. Unstable only means that the packages may update in non-backwards compatible ways, so you need to be prepared to make changes to accommodate that. Normally it's something like updating a configuration file, or passing different flags to a command line program, or something along those lines. Maybe you run some sort of service that links to shared libraries on the system, you need to be prepared to relink to updated versions or not depend on system-wide versions at all.
So long as you make sure to keep up with changes, rolling release distros are exactly as reliable as upstream releases.
The other thing to note is that tracking releases may actually end up being more reliable, because you are constantly getting bug fixes and improvements!
It broke the whole system so I decided to just remove snaps as a whole.
I run Arch Linux daily since 2019 and the only problems I had that I can remember are setting up dual-GPU on laptops and dealing with dual boot issues - whenever my laptop had a BIOS update on Windows, my BIOS settings would be reverted to the default, so the F1-12 keys acted as fn keys by default (e.g. pressing F5 wouldn't refresh a web page), Windows overwrote the bootloader on my boot partition so I had to reinstall GRUB/systemd-boot every time this happened and it also changed the SATA mode for the laptop which made it impossible to locate the Linux partition on my HDD unless I switched it back to AHCI (default was Intel RST + Optane).
The other issue I recently had with Arch which I think it's more related to the software and not the distro itself is that occasionally my Latte Dock will crash, but that's about it.
As a mitigation, I use Nix to run anything that isn't packaged for Alpine (e.g. Deno), and that actually works pretty well, but having a parallel set of libraries kind of defeats my whole purpose for running Alpine, namely a having trim system without any bloat (on a netbook with 1 GB of RAM).
Note that, in my case, I'm not using Alpine for the "user experience", but solely because it is the most lightweight distribution (important when running on a machine with 1 GB of RAM). I was able to set up a C programming environment on a Raspberry Pi in only 300 MB... of disk space, not RAM! :)
1. NVidia seem to love debian/ubuntu more that other distros, and in general I don't want to waste much time with setting up machine learning env/CUDA on my machines
2. work has debian based distro, so using same tool/mindset is convenient
but I really want to get rid of it because of snaps and overall attitute (previous controversies with their unity desktop manager, ads in it etc). I kind of didn't cared much then as I switched to Mint linux (even that had different distro names to annoy when need to set nvidia) and went back then ubuntu + i3. Right now it seems it's time to ditch ubuntu completely.
If you want something on the desktop that is close enough to Ubuntu but without the snaps, you might want to have a look at Linux Mint: https://linuxmint.com/
Or some might also just use Debian with a desktop environment installed, there's not too many reasons to not do that.
Most recently, I had Manjaro running on my Thinkpad for about 3 years before I wiped it and put W10 on it for my fiancee. Since getting a Steam Deck I've been eyeballing Linux on the desktop again, having seen firsthand how well Proton works.
Having effectively been a Linux baby 3 times, I have to say Manjaro was everything I thought Ubuntu would be when I tried it. I remember Ubuntu being intractable, hard to use, and weird to update. Manjaro seemed almost effortless to use, and honestly I'd probably recommend it to a Windows user over any other offerings at the current juncture.
Instead I’m solidly confident that macOS as a daily driver is the right choice for a busy developer who doesn’t want to mess with stuff.
Everyone of course is going to have different experiences, but I continue to be disappointed how issue ridden MacOS Ventura has been for me. My Fedora laptop could run for weeks without the need for a reboot (honestly only necessary because I used Silverblue which is immutable), whereas my Macbook constantly has issues adjusting scaling when plugging in a monitor during sleep (necessitating logging out and in), or randomly failing to connect to any WiFi connection after waking up, requiring a full reboot around three times a week.
The settings app is appalling too, I genuinely am flabbergasted how sluggish (as in not loading settings pages for multiple seconds) it can be, especially considering the hardware. Very rarely, Xcode will try to open even though I set VSCode as the default for that file type, but this may be user error (though I don't see what else I can do beyond click that tick). Also, though this is more their design than a fault, I have become far to reliant on dnf via toolbox and whilst I am thankful for Homebrew, I can't stop feeling that a more integrated package manager would make MacOS more usable. Worst of all though is how MacOS handles USB peripherals. Upon plugging in, it should ask for confirmation, a good idea in theory. But for me, no matter the device (printer, usb drive, hub, display), this confirmation window only appears for a split second before disappearing. I then have to unplug and replug the cable about five times before, for some magic reason, the confirmation window stays upon permanently and I can actually interact with it. I tried a fresh install and spend a bit of time on the phone with customer support, neither helped. Simply cannot see MacOS as the choice for someone who needs to rely on their machine in this state.
I'm constantly testing the Asahi Fedora Remix[0] and cannot wait for that to be at a level where I can use it day-to-day. The hardware is amazing, but the software really needs to be improved.
[0] https://pagure.io/fedora-asahi/asahi-repos/tree/main
This is true in the way you intend it, but also in a way that you don't.
Yes, macOS "just works" for most stuff--so you don't have to mess with it.
However, if you hit one of those things that does not just work, you can't mess with it so you still don't have to mess with it.
(Yes, I have hit them and they were enough to make me leave the macOS system. USB and Bluetooth are perennial frustrations for me with macOS and there are active threads with dozens of pages of complaints--so it isn't just me.)
Every time I end up on the Ubuntu machine: "sudo apt install somet<tab><tab>" nothing. Urgh. Off I go to Google "install <package> Ubuntu" and visit some third party website for a .deb.
If I wanted to circumvent the packaging system by default, I'd use Windows.
I guess my needs are meager.
Okay, I don't *need* to install Minecraft, but I like it.
Yes, Edge works just great on Linux, probably better than it does on Windows.
I am not a typical Linux user. I have been doing weird and unsupported shit with it since kernel 0.93 and I know what I'm getting into before I unscrew the lid.
I don't have to optimise my machine to get the calculator run within 1-2 seconds, this is just bad by design and there is no excuse.
They are an abomination or workaround for problems in OS library packaging (& manager) and OS security concepts.
If snaps are so cool why are there no similar concepts in other famous major desktops (even non Linux)?
APKs are pretty much the Android equivalent. In both cases the key features are sandboxing and bundling of dependencies. The stores also work roughly equivalently - like with snaps you can install an APK without a store, and that mechanism is what alternative stores use, but for full integration there's really just one: the Google Play Store.
iOS works pretty much the same way too, as far as I understand.
And sideloading. I prefer to sideload when possible.
What drove me from Fedora was mostly the need to upgrade every 6 months, and the short support windows.
I like how they need to defend themselves for using a 5 year old laptop.
I have a 2016 Dell latitude laying around with Debian 11 on it. It is plenty fast for most things. Even running virtual machines in virtual box with gaming (mostly older Windows games I run in a WinXP VM)
The big improvement with modern laptops isn't compute power, it's energy efficiency and thus battery life, and also weight. Modern laptops are a lot easier to carry than 10-year-old models since they weigh a fraction as much.
It's a chunky laptop, but gets me going when I travel to a place where security can be iffy. So looks like an old VCR, and get less attention than an apple logo.
Heck, a medium-spec 20 year old computer is plenty fast for common desktop use.