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I use Debian testing as my daily driver at home and at work, and have found it to be plenty stable over the decade or so that I've been using it. I've also bee

by ohazi 5y ago

I use Debian testing as my daily driver at home and at work, and have found it to be plenty stable over the decade or so that I've been using it. I've also been using Arch on a "for messing around; I don't care if it breaks" laptop for about two years, and haven't had any major breakages. For me, the most noticable difference has been that Debian will install new kernels as new packages, will suggest removing old kernel packages, but won't suggest removing the currently booted kernel. I like this behavior. By default, Arch will swap your currently booted kernel and modules out from under you. You don't necessarily need to reboot right away, but if you don't, you can run into issues loading modules or recovering from hibernation. You can work around this once you realize what's happening, but it seems like a needlessly dangerous default.

nemetroid 5y ago
See https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/16702 https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/16702 for a discussion about versioned kernel installs in Arch.
DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
I'm using Sid as a daily driver on all my dev machines[1]. I run apt dist-upgrade twice a week too and I back up to external drive once a week. I've never once been in a situation (since ca. mid 2000) where I needed to restore from backup or boot into single user mode. My favorite documentation is the arch wiki and there has never been an issue due to it not being compatible to the "Debian way" When upstream devs package for a distribution they usually put some effort into it. Just because a package gets published to Sid/unstable doesn't mean the package is unstable. There are some devs that mostly work on higher layer GUI and user-lamd applications who are perhaps inexperienced or reckless who do sometimes introduce breaking changes. It's rare though since most people understand that packaging for a distro means a potential huge number of issues if they're not careful My 70+ year old aunt also runs sid since a couple of years with unattended upgrades since I installed it for her (and she has KDE). She never had issues with stability or things not working and she uses her computer daily for writing (libreoffice), printing and research (probably reddit idk, I didn't ask :)). [1] my install is fairly minimal: not much gui, server systems etc are started with docker so hardly anything actually runs on bare-metal which can cause issues during upgrade jeopardizing the things I work on (e.g. due to config file changes). And I don't have a huge DE like gnome/KDE. My sway/wlroots and i3, and tooling like x-terminal/wofi/Waybar/etc are always compiled from git/source. All my dev tooling is the latest and I can still install older versions of clang/gcc or other environments with my package manager if I have to.

by ohazi 5y ago

nemetroid 5y ago

See https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/16702 https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/16702 for a discussion about versioned kernel installs in Arch.

DyslexicAtheist 5y ago

I'm using Sid as a daily driver on all my dev machines[1]. I run apt dist-upgrade twice a week too and I back up to external drive once a week. I've never once been in a situation (since ca. mid 2000) where I needed to restore from backup or boot into single user mode. My favorite documentation is the arch wiki and there has never been an issue due to it not being compatible to the "Debian way" When upstream devs package for a distribution they usually put some effort into it. Just because a package gets published to Sid/unstable doesn't mean the package is unstable. There are some devs that mostly work on higher layer GUI and user-lamd applications who are perhaps inexperienced or reckless who do sometimes introduce breaking changes. It's rare though since most people understand that packaging for a distro means a potential huge number of issues if they're not careful My 70+ year old aunt also runs sid since a couple of years with unattended upgrades since I installed it for her (and she has KDE). She never had issues with stability or things not working and she uses her computer daily for writing (libreoffice), printing and research (probably reddit idk, I didn't ask :)). [1] my install is fairly minimal: not much gui, server systems etc are started with docker so hardly anything actually runs on bare-metal which can cause issues during upgrade jeopardizing the things I work on (e.g. due to config file changes). And I don't have a huge DE like gnome/KDE. My sway/wlroots and i3, and tooling like x-terminal/wofi/Waybar/etc are always compiled from git/source. All my dev tooling is the latest and I can still install older versions of clang/gcc or other environments with my package manager if I have to.