I broke my install by updating it, I get that if you perfectly understand what’s going on then it has no bugs but that’s really not my experience. A lot of the time something will break and it’s easy to say “I should’ve known it was this so it’s my fault” but really if you didn’t expect it to work a certain way and it breaks it’s not a super stable system.
My Ubuntu broke literally every time I did a version upgrade. It’s probably better now, but I’m not going back.
The last system that straight up broke for me was a default installation of Debian Stable, and that wasn’t long ago.
I understand Arch isn’t easy to use or maintain.
But in my opinion, if you use something wrong and it breaks, that doesn’t mean it’s unstable. And if you update Arch by simply hitting “pacman -Syu” every day, you’re doing it wrong.
But if lots of people use it wrong and break it then maybe it’s too obtuse. I broke one of my applications by upgrading packages. The solution? Install the package again, I thought the package manager would take care of stuff like that but if it’s meant to be me then I think it’s a bad system.
I always find it kinda weird when people criticize free software.
Like, the developers make something, give it to you for free, pay for server space so you can download it for free, and then you say “it sucks”.
OK, just don’t use it then.
Criticism and hate are two different things. I hate windows, I can criticise parts of arch Linux which is so far my favourite OS. Me not liking part of it or the way it works doesn’t mean there’s another version that is completely perfect and I should just shut up and use that. Also no it doesn’t suck, but updating my system and having it break is a problem I should not be having.
Same. I’ve switched to Arch from Ubuntu as my main os almost 10 years ago and in all that time I’ve had a problem that goes beyond inconvenience level maybe twice. In fact Ubuntu broke more often.
Apparently the upgrade (including configuration) is incredibly smooth. Those interested in tinkering with the vanilla experience have had to install it in a VM.
Made the switch on EndeavourOS this morning and so far so good. I was hesitant to update to Wayland because I’m still a newb and heard there were issues, but my system is AMD based so no problems (yet).
I really like Void Linux. It is a bit harder to use if you’re a beginner, since it’s really minimalist and uses its own init system, but overall it’s really customizable and packages are kind of new (it is currently on the 6.6.21 kernel version, as a measure).
It will be isolated in its own directory, as I said I think distrobox.it+neon+, own home will be a far better solution of course. I keep hearing Flatpak is adding snap-like deeper features so I wondered how far it went. About the KDE 6 being unstable: I think they wanted to ship something out and for people preferring stability, 5.x LTS will be there for a long time.
I can’t see the point in that? Certain tools could work fine, but the actual desktop environment? It’d be running in a sandbox and would need to be given access to everything to function presumably. The various tools need to communicate with each other and the X11 or Wayland composite. So the flatpak container would just be overhead with a lot of duplication of system libraries? I’m not even sure it’s possible but I don’t know enough of the limitations of flatpak.
It’s an interesting idea to test and play wth but I can’t see it as an actual viable means of distribution.
If you wanted to play with plasma 6 then Virtual box and KDE Neon or Arch would be the way, and would negate the work needed to to get it working via flatpak. So I guess what would be the benefit for anyone to build and test it via flatpak even if for feasible?
I mean as you can use far newer KDE applications on Debian stable via Flatpak, it may serve the same purpose contained in a separate tree without changing the core OS.
I guess distrobox+neon would work fine yes. I just wondered the state of Flatpak with the recent changes.
I just applied the update to my old laptop that has been kickin KDE on Arch for a while now. The only thing I noticed was it took longer to load the desktop the first time, my them was broken but everything was fine when I selected the default dark theme. The fonts look different but otherwise its the same as it ever was
I’m on KDE Arch and switched about a week ago. I have an Nvidia card and went straight from x11 to Wayland plasma 6. It’s definitely prettier and smoother, but it’s absolutely not as stable. Idk if that’s an Nvidia things, a Wayland thing, or a plasma 6 thing, but I definitely have fairly consistent display issues after switching. I have a btrfs snapshot from right before I updated that’s at plasma 5, so I have a fallback if I want it. It’s mostly just an inconvenience right now, so I’ll probably just ride it out for a while and see if things improve.
It’s definitely Wayland on Nvidia, I had the same issues, Element had a flickering black screen. Switching the default session from Wayland to X11 fixed all issues.
From my experience it happens with any XWayland window that fails to hit your display refresh rate. Makes programs such as vscode or element almost impossible to use on high Hz screens, as their max fps is locked to 60.
Yeah, this kind of misunderstands what debian is. If you wanted newer bleeding edge stuff you wouldn’t be using debian. Debian is all about the stability.
That said, Debian Sid or testing (the bleeding edge system that 13 will come from) may move to 6? Debian 12 was last year so 13 would be in 2025, so it seems likely 6 will make its way into the bleeding edge versions if people really wanted to use it. But there are better options for most end users than using test versions of major distros.
Thats seriously overstating things. I’ve been running testing or sid for years and years, and I can only remember a handful of times where anything meaningfully broke. And typically its dependency breakages, not actual software breakages.
Yes I’m aware of the security tradeoffs with testing, which is why I’ve started refraining from mentioning it as an option as pedants like to pop out of the woodwork and mention this exact issue every damn time.
Also, testing absolutely gets “security support”, the issue is that security fixes don’t land in testing immediately and so there can be some delay. As per the FAQ:
Security for testing benefits from the security efforts of the entire project for unstable. However, there is a minimum two-day migration delay, and sometimes security fixes can be held up by transitions. The Security Team helps to move along those transitions holding back important security uploads, but this is not always possible and delays may occur.
Debian is not all about “stability” in the sense of “doesn’t crash”. Debian is all about consistency. The platform doesn’t change. That means if there is a bug that crashes the system for you… it’s going to consistently be there.
For me, it was when stable was on kernel 3.16, and 3.18 was in testing, but the latest kernel was 3.19. And this was an era where AMD’s drivers not fully OpenGL compliant yet. Which meant games would crash. And knowing “this game will always crash until 3 years from now when we finally get a newer kernel” was enough to chase me off.
debian’s neovim package is 0.7.2. Sid is 0.7.2. Experimental is 0.9.5… If there are any bugfixes between 0.7.2 and 0.9.5 that are critical for your workflow… too bad. If its not a “security” release, its not getting updated. You can live with knowing the bug.
“Never change anything, stick to known good versions” only works if you know 100% that the “known good version” is actually bug free. No code is bug free, so inevitably the locked down versions in Debian will have still some flaws (and debian doesn’t backport bugfixes, they only backport SECURITY fixes). For most use cases, the flaws will be minor enough to not matter. But inevitably, if a flaw exists, it affects SOMEONE.
If you actually want to do any sort of complicated computing, debian is not a great choice. if you want a unchanging base so you can run a web browser and processor, I’m sure it’s great.
Most people use stable to refer to something that doesn’t crash or cause issues. Something that you might call “rock solid” which implies it’s not going to fall over. Something to put on your server because you’ll get great uptime without issues.
Debian is one of the few places where stable might crash more than unstable, because known bugs in Debian don’t get backported unless they cause security issues.
I use Debian on my servers because “some testing” is nice and the only thing I run on my servers is docker. And ironically, I have to use a PPA for docker.
So for me, it’s a stable enough base OS, but it “too stable” for anything that actually runs on the servers.
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