so a common claim I see made is that arch is up to date than Debian but harder to maintain and easier to break. Is there a good sort of middle ground distro between the reliability of Debian and the up-to-date packages of arch?
fedora is a good middle ground
To be honest PopOS is great. Frequent updates, good (subjective) design and ui choices, just works. If it fits your vibe I would say it is a good balance!
It also has the benefit of being able to apply the vast majority of Ubuntu tutorials, etc. since it’s based on it. Plus it doesn’t force you to use snaps for everything.
OpenSUSE tumbleweed is a good compromise IMO. it is also a rolling release distro with built in snapshotting. So if anything does go wrong it takes ~5 mins to roll back to the last good snapshot. You can set the same thing up on arch but it isn’t ootb and YAST is a great management tool as well.
It’s not even a compromise really, it’s very up to date and very stable.
I would say Tumblewees is better than traditional Fedora.
But the lack of desktops, variants, adoption, as well as the lack of being able to reset a system, makes it less stable than Fedora Atomic Desktops.
Resetting is huge. You can revert to a bit-by-bit copy of the current upstream.
It is not complete at all, but already works as a daily driver. uBlue deals with almost all the edges that are left.
Tbh my main gripe with Tumbleweed is the package manager as someone who likes to use the CLI, the weird naming convention, renames, etc are annoying. Also found some minor annoyances that all put together made me choose Fedora over Tumbleweed. I can see why some people would like it tho.
You can use dnf on OpenSuse, and it actually uses the correct
/etc/dnf.repos.d!zyppers UI is horrible, no idea at what internet speed those animations make sense, not on an even 2,4GHz wifi.
I used QGis as a Fedora Distrobox didnt install the language package, because it installs only the one from the OS. on Tumbleweed all languages were always installed, but it had some issue where no plugins worked or something.
Same with RStudio, which works creat with iucar/cran COPR and the R-CoprManager app that makes it use dnf underneath.
Rstudio should absolutely install them as libs though, into /var/lib. Then the Flatpak could be made working too I guess.
I found zypper package speed for download seems to vary a lot, sometimes superfast and other times it drips in like old dialup. Maybe server load or what default server it hits is too many hops away or something. It also does delta downloads, which makes sense if your data is capped, but takes a lot longer to negotiate the lookup for update, compare versions, and pull delta only.
Good thing about zypper and SUSE setup is you can use the various patch, patches, list patches commands to see what is unneeded, recommended or critical, CVE, and if has already been applied to your system or not. Great tool for sysadmin
Yes I would love to have mail notifications etc for security updates.
Currently setting up a server, CentOS installer didnt boot so my lazy ass just rebased to securecore (Fedora IoT -> uBlue uCore -> secureblue) which is very nice but rolling.
With LUKS encryption, which I want and need, this is problematic, as I need to manually type the password afaik. TPM unlock didnt work even though I have a Nitrokey with a TPM integrated afaik.
I am not 100% sure, but I had something similar with passworded drive. There was a way to edit crypt tab stuff so that when system looks for pwd input on boot it went to the hashed file to get password. I forget the steps I did, but online there is a walk through and it was not too difficult to configure…just a few manual file edits
but then why use OpenSUSE instead of just Fedora?
Because they have Slowroll and working, automatic BTRFS snapshots.
I have no idea what dnf Fedora is doing, using BTRFS but no snapshots.
I think fedora does have some automatic snapshots, just not as much as OpenSUSE. Still tho, why not setup better snapshots on Fedora rather than switch package manager and repos altogether on openSUSE?
No they dont. Just the basic kernel backups, which is pretty little
Fedora is a good middle ground, it’s what Asahi Linux uses as its official distro
+1 for Fedora. It is exactly what OP is asking for.
which Debian? Have you considered Debian testing or unstable?
Nobody here for Mint? I’m a long time Ubuntu user but when i do my next upgrade it will be to mint.
Both Ubuntu and mint are debian based.
Tumbleweed
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Rolling release, but has QA on the weekly builds. It fits between Debian and Arch for sure.
I’d say Fedora is the middle-ground. You get up-to-date software in a stable distribution with daily security updates, and fixed OS upgrades each year.
fedora atomic desktops (silverblue, kinoite, and derivatives like bluefin etc) are really great. They are as up-to-date as fedora, with an additional layer of stability provided by its atomic and image based nature.
Is there a good sort of middle ground distro between the reliability of Debian and the up-to-date packages of arch?
This guy:
(OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).
Or maybe Slowroll.For private use? Hot take, but Arch. It’s easy to maintain and not easy to break at all. I think I spend zero time on maintenance other than running package updates. I only reinstall when I get a new computer.
(I say for private use only because you’ll be getting weird looks from people if you use arch on a server in a professional setting, and it might break if you try to update it after five years of not doing it since there aren’t any “releases” to group big changes - in practice I run arch on my home server too with no issues)
My server has been on Endeavour OS (arch with a gui installer) for at least 18 months. I run updates roughly every 10 days (basically whenever I remember). Never had a problem with it. I dare say it could go horribly wrong at some point so I keep the LTS kernel installed as well just as a fall back.
My main pc is also running Endeavour OS (dual boot with windows 11). Other than having to keep Bluetooth downgraded to support the ps5 dual sense controller, it runs great.
My only gripe is that updates often contain something that forces the kernel rebuild process and so it needs a reboot afterwards.
Every other Linux I’ve run has had some sort of “rebuild to fix” type issue at some point, or had been hard to find good support information for. Endeavour OS has been the most reliable and the easiest to fix and find support for.
Opensuse tumbleweed. The packages go through a testing process unlike Fedora AFAIK.
Several months ago I installed Tumbleweed on a VM just for kicks and giggles. A week later it refused to install updates at all due to some weird conflict, even though the system was vanilla to the goddamn wallpaper. In a week I try upgrading and magically the conflict is gone. I’ll be honest, this was my only experience with Tumbleweed and it managed to have its update system broken in the meantime. I’ve never had anything close to this on Debian Unstable lol.
Not hating on Tumbleweed, on the contrary - I have been testing it for quite a while to see if it’s as good as they say. But it doesn’t look like a middle ground between Arch and Debian. At least in my short experience.
Was that updating with “zypper dup”? I’ve heard going through discover or zypper update isn’t the recommended way strictly speaking, so its worth mentioning.
It was a kde update centre which is installed by default and suggests updates when they’re available. But zypper was also failing.
Ah okay, I’m not sure then.
SuSE Slowroll. Not rolling release. Also not super-conservative like Debian is.
Note, that it is still in experimental state.
