3 ms·

Which one would you recommend for regular users and power users?

jauntywundrkind 9mo ago
Debian/testing, with stable pinned on at low priority. It slows down for a couple months around release, but generally provides pretty reliable & up to date experience with a very good OS. Dance dance the red spiral.
- r_lee 9mo ago
  You can go for sid too :)
  - jauntywundrkind 9mo ago
    I run sid (debian's unstable branch) on all my systems, it's great! With experimental pinned on at low priority! It's great, I love it! I'm not quite bold enough to recommend it to people but if anyone asks I would definitely say yes to running sid. Apt-pin for testing at low priority is good to have, just because sometimes there's lag when one library updates for everyone using it to update, and you can get unsatisfiable dependencies.
- gspr 9mo ago
  A stable-testing mix is quite exotic. What are you trying to achieve here?
  - jauntywundrkind 9mo ago
    It's rare but every now and then testing has an unsatisfiable dependency. It's usually resolved within a day or so. But I keep a lower distro around basically to insure I have a fallback, so I'm not blocked now. The next update should likely get me back to testing.
    - gspr 9mo ago
      The conventional way to resolve temporarily unsatisfiable dependencies in Testing is to include Unstable at a lower priority, since that's where packages migrate to Testing from. Stable is a distinctly different distribution, and you're far more likely to see e.g. library ABIs from there incompatible with Testing.
horsawlarway 9mo ago
Not joking, Arch. Pick Gnome/KDE/Sway as you please. Arch is a wonderful daily driver distro for folks who can deal with even a small amount of configuration. Excellent software availability through AUR, excellent update times (pretty much immediate). The only downside is there's not a ton of direct commercial software packaged for it by default (ex - most companies they care give a .deb or a .rpm) but that's easily made up for by the rest of AUR. It's not even particularly hard to install anymore - run `archinstall` https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall make some choices, get a decent distro. Throw in that steam support is pretty great... and it's generally one of the best distros available right now for general use by even a moderate user. Also fine as a daily driver for kids/spouses as long as there's someone in the house to run pacman every now and then, or help install new stuff.
zamalek 9mo ago
If you want something relatively uninteresting: Fedora or Debian (honestly, stable is fine). If you want something extremely reliable, more modern, but may require some learning to tweak: Silverblue or Kinoite.
- direwolf20 9mo ago
  Debian updates even less frequently than Ubuntu and stays with years old versions of packages. If you're looking for fresh, Debian is not it. Maybe Arch?
  - horsawlarway 9mo ago
    Yeah, the folks in here recommending Debian as a solution to this problem are insane. I love Debian, it's a great distro. It's NOT the distro I'd pick to drive things like my laptop or personal development machine. At least not if you have even a passing interest in: - Using team communication apps (slack/teams/discord) - Using software built for windows (Wine/Proton) - Gaming (of any form) - Wayland support (or any other large project delivering new features relatively quickly) - Hardware support (modern linux kernels) I'd recommend it immediately as a replacement for Ubuntu as a server, but I won't run it for daily drivers. Again - Arch (or it's derivatives) are basically the best you can get in that space.
    - r_lee 9mo ago
      Debian has multiple editions, if you want Arch, go for sid/testing. Stable is stable as in "must not be broken at all costs" kind of stable. basically everything works just fine. there's occasionally a rare crash or gnome reset where you need to login again, but other than that not many problems.
      - akdev1l 9mo ago
        No Debian is stable as in “it shall not change”. There are times where there are known bugs in Debian which are purposely not fixed but instead documented and worked around. That’s part of the stability promise. The behaviour shall not change which sometimes includes “bug as a feature”
stalfosknight 9mo ago
Arch or Endeavour

Debian/testing, with stable pinned on at low priority. It slows down for a couple months around release, but generally provides pretty reliable & up to date experience with a very good OS. Dance dance the red spiral.

r_lee 9mo ago
You can go for sid too :)
- jauntywundrkind 9mo ago
  I run sid (debian's unstable branch) on all my systems, it's great! With experimental pinned on at low priority! It's great, I love it! I'm not quite bold enough to recommend it to people but if anyone asks I would definitely say yes to running sid. Apt-pin for testing at low priority is good to have, just because sometimes there's lag when one library updates for everyone using it to update, and you can get unsatisfiable dependencies.
gspr 9mo ago
A stable-testing mix is quite exotic. What are you trying to achieve here?
- jauntywundrkind 9mo ago
  It's rare but every now and then testing has an unsatisfiable dependency. It's usually resolved within a day or so. But I keep a lower distro around basically to insure I have a fallback, so I'm not blocked now. The next update should likely get me back to testing.
  - gspr 9mo ago
    The conventional way to resolve temporarily unsatisfiable dependencies in Testing is to include Unstable at a lower priority, since that's where packages migrate to Testing from. Stable is a distinctly different distribution, and you're far more likely to see e.g. library ABIs from there incompatible with Testing.

horsawlarway 9mo ago

Not joking, Arch. Pick Gnome/KDE/Sway as you please. Arch is a wonderful daily driver distro for folks who can deal with even a small amount of configuration. Excellent software availability through AUR, excellent update times (pretty much immediate). The only downside is there's not a ton of direct commercial software packaged for it by default (ex - most companies they care give a .deb or a .rpm) but that's easily made up for by the rest of AUR. It's not even particularly hard to install anymore - run `archinstall` https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall make some choices, get a decent distro. Throw in that steam support is pretty great... and it's generally one of the best distros available right now for general use by even a moderate user. Also fine as a daily driver for kids/spouses as long as there's someone in the house to run pacman every now and then, or help install new stuff.

zamalek 9mo ago

If you want something relatively uninteresting: Fedora or Debian (honestly, stable is fine). If you want something extremely reliable, more modern, but may require some learning to tweak: Silverblue or Kinoite.

direwolf20 9mo ago
Debian updates even less frequently than Ubuntu and stays with years old versions of packages. If you're looking for fresh, Debian is not it. Maybe Arch?
- horsawlarway 9mo ago
  Yeah, the folks in here recommending Debian as a solution to this problem are insane. I love Debian, it's a great distro. It's NOT the distro I'd pick to drive things like my laptop or personal development machine. At least not if you have even a passing interest in: - Using team communication apps (slack/teams/discord) - Using software built for windows (Wine/Proton) - Gaming (of any form) - Wayland support (or any other large project delivering new features relatively quickly) - Hardware support (modern linux kernels) I'd recommend it immediately as a replacement for Ubuntu as a server, but I won't run it for daily drivers. Again - Arch (or it's derivatives) are basically the best you can get in that space.
  - r_lee 9mo ago
    Debian has multiple editions, if you want Arch, go for sid/testing. Stable is stable as in "must not be broken at all costs" kind of stable. basically everything works just fine. there's occasionally a rare crash or gnome reset where you need to login again, but other than that not many problems.
    - akdev1l 9mo ago
      No Debian is stable as in “it shall not change”. There are times where there are known bugs in Debian which are purposely not fixed but instead documented and worked around. That’s part of the stability promise. The behaviour shall not change which sometimes includes “bug as a feature”

stalfosknight 9mo ago

Arch or Endeavour