They say debian is free and has its promise, but Arch has like 2-4 maintainers?
I'm honestly not sure if I'm witnessing the most autistic responses to the most obvious shitpost ever, or if the AI bots got into Lemmy already.
Why wouldn't we? Lemmy has at least 12 real people.
I'm a real people, and I'm livid that I shouldn't respond with a paragraph about Mint because this is obvious shitposting.
That's right, you are a real people! You can tell you're real because your eyes are real eyes.emoji . This was first discovered by the early 21st century philosopher — jayden smith.
So are you, Bruce. You're also real, and don't need to dress up in a rubber suit for attention. You're good enough.
try one for a week, switch to the other for a week, and if you feel like it, switch to any other whenever you want
Plan9
Just get Cachyos its what I use and is super easy and based on Arch
Two extremes here. Debian is slow to update while arch is bleeding edge.
I avoid containerized desktop apps (snap, flatpak) so I couldn't run Debian as a daily driver. You'd want to use the latest FireFox and their repo's release is old. You you can get it from flatpak, but I don't want to do that. Running on recent (<1y) hardware will also be problematic. I guess you could keep on adding 3rd party repos to your install, though some post from debian forums always stuck with me: "Debian is only what is released + whats in the official repo. Install anything else and you're not running debian anymore.". Its a whacky OS and I love it, but daily drive it only on my server.
Arch puts everything on their repo straight away. And if its not there, you're downloading code from AUR and building it yourself. I actually appreciate this since it complies with the philosophy that you can't really trust your applications unless you read the source and build it yourself. Awesome, but the general public shouldn't be doing this... I don't mind applications being distributed in binary form. I am able to trust linux community maintained repositories. Arch is for the geeks imo.
I found Fedora to be a good middle ground, since it gets package updates straight away while still maintaining fixed OS releases. No need for snap or flatpaks since their repo has everything and is updated. Its also widely supported by software vendors (just like debian). Id go with it as a recommendation, but still note that its philosophy is free software only and this can potentially mean tinkering with additional stuff from RPM fusion, especially if you dance with nvidia and watch videos encoded with non free codecs.
It takes a bit of time to find the right distro and that is the biggest obstacle to linux imo.
I avoid containerized desktop apps (snap, flatpak) so I couldn’t run Debian as a daily driver.
Wat? this is the dumbest take of the day.
Feel free to chose either one, but avoiding Debian for this reason is just plain wrong.
It takes a bit of time to find the right distro and that is the biggest obstacle to linux imo.
It’s also the greatest benefit. Vanilla stuff works out of the box for most, but once you need more, there’s a paved runway headed in any direction you want to go (some in better shape than others to be fair).
Windows and OS X are certainly wider runways, but there are cliffs off the side of you want to change direction.
Good things usually take time, but you will know where you are when you get there.
Can have fast Debian with ceres [1] ~ er, I mean with sid. And experimental staging area even beyond that.
Can have slower more stable (~?) arch with manjaro.
While neither are gentoo, they (/ the community) have availed at least that much choice.
[1: that's Devuan's]
PS, speaking of
Its a whacky OS and I love it
look at this old wacky thing I love (and have been daily driving since).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuYMBCcgs98
Gets around those quandries of having to pick which one, like between bleeding edge rolling and LTS stable, or between arch and debian, or whatever other pair of otherwise seemingly mutually exclusive criteria that otherwise seem inescapable from compromise. Nope. No quandry. Can haz both. ;)
Shshsh. ;) Linux's best kept secret. Hehe.
Out of curiosity, why avoid Flatpak? I get snap or AppImage, but Flatpak is generally great.
Not parent poster, but this is a detailed explanation for the big ideas.
Wow, thanks for the link! I'm a huge Flatpak fan and always thought they were awesome. I still do, but a lot of the issues in that blog were news to me. Thanks for sharing, it was a really good read!
Not OP, but this is a fantastic answer, and I wish I'd read it before installing Deb on my wife and friend's computers!
I use CachyOS, but decided "bleeding edge" would be more of a nuisance than help for them, so opted for "very stable", then immediately ran into challenges trying to get apps, and needed to get containerized apps for everything. I should have gone with something Fedora-based or just stuck with what I know, CachyOS.
what apps did you need to install containerized?
Stremio was the big one, but maybe I just didn't try hard enough.
Getting Wine/Bottles working with a niche work remote desktop streaming app was a huge pain, too, while in CachyOS it's 1-click to get it all set up from the Hello app.
On my CachyOS desktop, I use Docker images for a couple things: my mesh wifi network controller server (Omada) and for ripping Kindle books to .epub with a specific Windows setup that still works (I need to read with TTS and Kindle broke native Android TTS when they implemented their own shitty TTS option, so I .epub everything.)
I don't think I use any other containerized apps, aside from my work Windows VM (which is only required for SharePoint integration in Explorer.)
Stremio has a native Debian package right on it's download page.
And as to all the other stuff, that is super specific and is hardly a reason to not recommend debian to a random person.
I've been a Debian guy for a long time for one reason, stability. I don't game a lot, but haven't had an issue in years, my son uses arch and games way more than I do, but he also has to fix a lot more stuff that updates seem to break.
If you are under 30 I almost want to encourage Arch as you'll be forced to learn a bit more over time and learning is never a bad thing. If you might game some, but value a rock solid system, go Debian.
Teach good debugging practices early
Yup. I'm late to this. My first rubber duck ordered days ago, due for delivery.
If you want your system to be reliable, stable and in essence boring: Debian.
If you want to be hands-on, on the bleeding edge and updating daily: Arch.
As any fule kno, the true answer to this is Haiku. Particularly as it's now officially* supported on M-series Macs.
_
"As any fool know?
Sorry if that's obvious.
Meh, not relevant.
Debian user that reccomends it. I don't game or need latest gizmos. I want and have a computer that is very reliable and maintenance free.
Debian Unstable, if you like to live dangerously and have to reboot every couple of years.
/s
I like that even without the "/s"
If you have to ask, you definitely don't want Arch
If you know vaguely what you're doing or are willing to learn, you can go with whatever and it'll be fine.
Personally not a big fan of debian because they tend to be slower and more conservative on updates. Arch is a bit more technical, but very customizable.
I'm personally a big fan of Fedora. Software updated quickly enough to have all the bells and whistles, slow enough to not get cut by bleeding edge software.
Debian is rock solid, there are even more user-friendly distros though. In a few edge-cases it will expect you to know your way around things, however there are a lot of guides for it. Going with this will cause the growth of a mighty white beard!
Arch Linux will make you cry. If you want to learn how to fix and configure things it's great (and their wiki arguably is the greatest of all), but their lack of QA and expectation to do that yourself often causes issues. You'll probably cut your fingers on its bleeding edge. If you want to learn with less bleeding I'd recommend CachyOS these days. I'm certainly not saying this because my computer didn't boot after updates multiple times. /s
HOWEVER if you have an Nvidia GPU, first off: I'm so sorry. Secondly, you absolutely (!) should use a distro that takes care of their driver for you. Their drivers are hot steaming garbage that you do not want to meddle with (many distros try their best to do it for you, but often enough it won't work for some people). See below, Nvidia distros marked with recycling symbol.
A few other options to consider with noticeable features:
And three others interesting if you might buy new hardware soon (damn, you rich):
I feel like there are other options here. Fedora? OpenSUSE?
Fedora is so, so nice. I have it on all my personal computers.
At my work they only tolerate Ubuntu. My God, it can be so frustrating. Snap gets in the way constantly. Somehow Ubuntu LTS seems to have a knack for precisely choosing the worst package versions for a workstation.
Fedora on the other hand just gets out of my way and lets me get shit done.
I am obligated to recommend Alamalinux at any and all opportunity
Debian is chosen for Satellites because it is "stable", that is it doesn't do major changes like changing the Kernel.
Arch isn't for beginners, but it's a rolling release distro that's nice and simple but powerful.
Some have started with arch.
Not all beginners are alike.
... Some even started with LFS.
Hint: :q!
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