I mean, sure Arch is flexible. All good footguns can mutilate me in a bunch of different ways.
I, uh, use Kubuntu LTS (
--minimal-install, so nosnap).Are *buntu flavors risky for my workstation? Should I be considering Fedora?
Are *buntu flavors risky for my workstation? Should I be considering Fedora?
Why would they be risky? O.o They’re the preferred workstation setup at my place because Ubuntu is spread enough that it can be relied upon to be the distro admins have the most experience with (which is a self-perpetuating thing, I am aware).
ITT - “I DISAGREE WITH THE FACTUAL ACCURACY OF THE SETUP AND/OR PUNCHLINE OF YOUR JOKE.”
Don’t forget SUSE’s focus on SAP… Which is also Germany I guess
Nixos: everything everywhere all at once
nixOS is for people who love config files
NixOS is for people who have accidentally uninstalled 90% of their system because they didn’t pay attention to what other packages depend on the thing they were uninstalling and were desperately looking for a an undo button.
NixOS is from Max Verstappen country not Sebastian Vettel country
you don’t even need to know where, you don’t even need to know when. that’s how every it gets
I think I’ve put fedora on at least 4 personal systems and it has never caused an issue. It’s so smooth it’s boring in the best way. Switched to it for daily computing about 4 years ago. I use a minipc as a media server with Arch and turning it on it’s exciting. Just this fucking morning the default configuration decided that my main audio device was a microphone. Lovely. So flexible.
I eventually landed on Fedora too. Its level of “it just works” is amazing.
Right!? Almost everything I need is one dnf command away with minimal setup on my part.
I’ll never stop hating that debian is labeled stable. I’m fully aware that they are using the definition of stable that simply means not updating constantly but the problem is that people conflate that with stability as in unbreaking. Except it’s the exact opposite in my experience, I’ve had apt absolutely obliterate debian systems way too often. Vs pacman on arxh seems to be exceptionally good at avoiding that. Sure the updated package itself could potentially have a bug or cause a problem but I can’t think of any instance where the actual process of updating itself is what eviscerated the system like with apt and dpkg.
And even in the event of an update going catastrophically wrong to the point that the system is inoperable I can simply chroot in use a statically built binary pacman and in a oneliner command reinstall ALL native packages in one go which I’ve never had not fix a borked system from interrupted update or needing a rollback
They really should have used the word “static” instead of stable. Stable definitely has connotations of functional stability, and unstable of functional instability.
Average Grandaddy Stable distro hater
You are maybe conflating stability with convenience.
“Why is this stable version of my OS unstable when I update and or install new packages…”
The entire OS falling down randomly on every distribution during normal OS background operations was always an issue or worry, and old Debbie Stables was meant to help make linux feel reliable for production server use, and it has done a decent job at it.
I mean when I can take an Arch Linux installation that I forgot about on my server and is now 8 years out of date and simply manually update the key ring and then be up to date without any issue but every time I’ve ever tried to do many multiple major version jumps on debian it’s died horrifically… I would personally call the latter less stable. Or at least less robust lol.
I genuinely think that because Arch Linux is a rolling distribution that it’s update process is just somehow more thorough and less likely to explode.
The last one with debian was a buster to bookworm jump. Midway through something went horrifically wrong and dpkg just bailed out. The only problem was that it somehow during all of that removed the entirety of every binary in /bin. Leaving the system completely inoperable and I attempted to Google for a similar solution as arch. Where i could chroot in and fix it with one simple line. But so far as I was able to find there is no such option with apt/dpkg. If I wanted to attempt to recover the system it would have been an entirely manual Endeavor with a lot of pain.
I would also personally label having the tools to recover from catastrophic failure as being an important part of stability especially when people advocate for things like Debian in a server critical environment and actively discourage the use of things like Arch
If the only thing granting at the title of stability is the lack of update frequency that can simply be recreated on Arch Linux by just not updating frequentlyಠ_ಠ
Did you go buster -> bullseye -> bookworm or just straight to bookworm? It sounds like something got screwed up with the usr merge.
Straight to bookworm. Sounds like that’s not supported but that just further shows why i don’t find it to be a functionally stable, or perhaps reliable is a better wording, system. But that’s also just my opinion
No opinion on Debian but as a heavy ArchLinux user I should point out you shouldn’t upgrade without reading the news as occasionally manual intervention is required. Upgrades can and will break things if you’re not careful.
https://archlinux.org/news/openblas-0323-2-update-requires-manual-intervention/
https://archlinux.org/news/ansible-core-2153-1-update-may-require-manual-intervention/
https://archlinux.org/news/incoming-changes-in-jdk-jre-21-packages-may-require-manual-intervention/
it would have been an entirely manual Endeavor with a lot of pain.
It’s funny that your phone auto corrected or you typed a capital E out of habit. I imagine you talk about Endeavor OS a lot lol.
Was using voice to text, it auto capitalizes words at absolute random. However yes i do use EndeavorOS so it comes up from time to time :p
While I personally agree with your sentiment, and much prefer arch to debian for my own systems, there is one way where debian can be more stable. When projects release software with bugs I usually have to deal with those on Arch, even if someone else has already submitted the bug reports upstream and they are already being worked on. There are often periods of a couple of weeks where something is broken - usually nothing big enough to be more than a minor annoyance that I can work around. Admittedly, I could just stop doing updates when everything seems to be working, to stay in a more stable state, but debian is a bit more broadly and thoroughly tested. Although the downside is that when upstream bugs do slip through into debian, they tend to stay there longer than they do on arch. That said, most of those bugs wouldn’t get fixed as fast upstream if not for rolling distro users testing things and finding bugs before buggy releases get to non-rolling “stable” distros.
depends on workload. Debian has very old packages and can be insecure but it is a set it and forget it type of thing, it is good when uptime is critical for a server. For desktops, or servers that need better security, but can tolerate a little downtime, rolling releases are good too, if you are enough to update frequently, and you should, since updates usually contain a lot of patched vulrenabilities
Good point! But I recently swapped to Debian 12 from Fedora 41. The latter needing constant updates several times a day. And despite this, it was not stable at all.
From my experience of Fedora: would you like to update today? Debian: You’re good bro, no updates today.
Flexibility translates to unpredictable.
What? I love Arch, it’s so god damn stable and fast.
Once i get another machine to dick around on ill try installing arch.
i started learning about linux 4 months ago. Installed Arch with archinstall pretty easily to a VM, it booted up no problem. But you have to manually install the desktop, if you want a gui (who doesn’t lol). But there are many desktops for Arch, the most common ones have pretty good documentation. But if i were you, i’d experiment with some more niche desktop emviroments
I haved used many distros and DEs. my favorites are keyboard driven like i3 and such. For now i use fedora because i needed something to work out of the box. I would like to stay in the terminal.
i tried lxqt and gnome. those were disappointments. And i used kde and cinnamon too, those are good
Nice i like lxqt but dont use it currently
Just use kvm/qemu and install it. When I want to play with detailed setups I install slackware and start configuring/compiling.
yeah i could do that. When i installed it i had a problem booting logging in, it wouldn’t goto the DE.
I would hope the Fedora isn’t the only one that cares about security
there are many distros with even better or similiar security as fedora. The least secure ones are Ubuntu and distros based on it, and Debian stable. Even less secure are any inactive distro. But in general, most distros can be hardened, some more, some less. Like i can harden my Android phone similiar to Arch’s level. (yes, i also use custom kernel on my phone, the most secure one for my device)
Fedora 41 is now the ‘wait 45 seconds every boot because you don’t have a tpm chip’ version.
Can i get some context please? My fedora install wasn’t using TPM, i had to manually configure it; i haven’t noticed any difference in boot speed with or without TPM encryption
Probably only affects a small number of AMD machines.
so if it probably affects only a small number of specific hw platforms, you cannot state fedora as “now wait 40 seconds” distro.
i’m also not using the tmd chip, no issues.
Why wouldn’t you just use a password?
I want to have data-at-rest encryption, so that the only password i need to insert is my user one, this allows me to not have to type passwords multiple times. If i had the regular encryption password i would have to enable autologin in SDDM, which would do away with the encryption on kdewallet and all my credentials.
Plus i also enable secureboot, and use fedora kinoite, so that i is hard to tamper with my boot stuff without my TPM wiping itself off my encryption password, this gives me a very Bitlocker-like setup, but without the shittiness of having my encryption keys linked to microsoft’s terrible encryption system and user accounts, i can actually control my stuff like this. For a laptop, i must say data-at-rest encryption is a must!
This setup gives me multiple security layers; took my laptop off me -> booted my laptop, faced with user password -> tried to boot another OS, TPM wiped itself, no more encryption key -> computer now asks for encryption password, has to find a way around LVM2 encryption -> LVM2 encryption (somehow) defeated they must now crack my user password, or have to (try) to decrypt my credentials on the file system itself; after all these convoluted and extremely hard steps i think we can agree this person really deserves to have access to my cool wallpapers
Secure boot and TPM aren’t known for there robust security. In fact, I’d wager that your machine is probably vulnerable.
Or for that matter, it is possible that your secure boot keys have been leaked or that your TPM is vulnerable to sniffing.
Yeah, i know; EUFI computers really suck, turning away the script kiddies and most people that would steal this computer from my data is is the most i can with this thing
Fedora shouldn’t be touching the TPM at all
that’s annoying. my laptop has TPM and i also encrypted the disk
I think, a more serious attempt to summarize openSUSE would probably be: Functionality
Debian, Arch, Fedora and such are all weirdly similar in that they focus so much on minimalism. For example, Debian uses
dashas the default shell, which breaks TTYs, but possibly squeezes out a tiny bit of performance, so I guess, that’s worth it…?i used Tumbleweed with KDE. It is something i can recommend. Not that customizable, but it has tons of features and very stable for a rolling distro. It only breaks if you try to customize stuff too much
Mint: easy
Mint: come for the ease of installation and use, stay because it’s just Ubuntu and Debian under the hood so it has tons of support, and the terminal is right there if you need to out so some real shit.
I think mine doesn’t roll off the tongue in quite the same way.
More accurate i would describe Fedora is:
Adopting Modern features first(Wayland,pipewire,etc Like there is no x mode in most stable Wayland desktops) and only having free and open source Repos(Rpmfusion can be added but its not official and excludes the Kernel drivers).Somehow, I feel called out.
