which Debian? Have you considered Debian testing or unstable?
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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Debian with Flatpak and a Distrobox container running Arch is pretty good if you want a stable desktop with rolling packages.
Atomic distros + distrobox/toolbx. Bluefin is a good start for general desktop or Bazzite for gaming (But Bluefin can be more stable, I use it for some games with steam in flatpak). If something breaks roll back to any release in the last 90 days with a single command. Install all of your packages in a distrobox (Arch if you need it). Otherwise in general Fedora is pretty good.
+1 for bazzite, if I wasn't a NixOS cultist it's probably what I'd still be daily driving. Stable, easy rollbacks, keeps itself updated as long as you reboot now and then. Just a great experience all around.
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I have a gentoo desktop but for a convenient middle ground just put Debian on my laptop. It’s stable, things just work out of the box, maintainers/devs are competent, they haven’t drunk the snap/flatpack kool-aid…
Switching to Testing is always an option but I’ve not found the need to do that yet when I can install programs from a deb package or just compile from source and install it in ~/.bin in my home directory.
I'm sure I'll get shouted down for this suggestion by the haters, but I'm going to make it anyway because it's actually really good:
Use an Ubuntu LTS flavour like Kubuntu. Then, add flatpak and for apps you want to keep up to date, install either the flatpak or the snap, depending on the particular app. In my personal experience, sometimes the flatpak is better and sometimes the snap is better. (I would add Nix to the mix, but I wouldn't call it particularly easy for beginners.)
This gets you:
- A reliable Debian-like base that you only have to upgrade to new releases every 2 years
- Up-to-date apps, including confinement for those apps
- New kernels every 6 months (if you choose - you don't have to, though)
Ubuntu not only lacks some basic packages but they make apt install them with snap instead.
I would go Debian testing as it has a huge selection of apps and has good support for Flatpak (like pretty much all Linux as Flatpak is build on standard kernel components)
From anecdotal experience I can only tell you that not once have I witnessed a showstopper bug on Arch. I recommend using btrfs and snapshots to really make sure however.
Arch pushes updates as they come with not much testing. This means you need to read before updating as it can break things. Pacman is also very fast at the cost of stability and ease of fixing
And yet I never do and it hardly ever does. And if it does, it's more often than not application specific and fixed by loading a snapshot and updating again after a week or so, which is next to 0 effort.
That takes my time which is valuable. I want it to work and stay up to date.
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Debian Testing.
Opensuse tumbleweed. The packages go through a testing process unlike Fedora AFAIK.
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IMO Debian is already pretty far middle-ground. The packages are new enough for my personal usage.
My recommendation would be Debian + Flatpak & Appimages (or + Snaps if you're the devil). Super stable, but also access to the latest.
Fedora is also a middle ground too, but they're pushing flatpaks heavily so it might not matter anyway since Fedora + flatpak and Debian + flatpak are about the same.
Garuda. It's an Arch derivative that creates a snapshot of your system every time you update. That way, if the update breaks something, you can just roll your system back to the last working snapshot.
Fedora, Ubuntu etc. use up to date packages if you're using flatpaks and snaps. Nix I suppose fits the bill better but it's a harder distro to "learn" than arch imo
How about Rhino? Rolling release of Debian Sid iirc
I've been using Arch for a year and nothing has broken. Did have to "fix" a lot of stuff after install because it was my first time using Arch and didn't realize all the other stuff I had to install... Mainly to get my Nvidia GPU to work. But a few hours later and it's been rock solid since.
Void linux