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beartyesterday at 8:44 PM1 replyview on HN

I've tried debian variants many times over the years. However, my actual experience has been one of struggles with outdated software, knowing that the fix I need is just out of reach. Trying to pull in some of these fixes from a PPA often leads to a dependency mess. I'm sure I could deal with it better if I took the time, but I just want to do the thing I want to do. The other "reason" to use Debian is the supposed large user base and community support. But I've found more often than not that many of the solutions to my problems are outdated or don't work for whatever reason.

Ironically, my best experience so far in that regard is an arch variant (CachyOS).

That said, people shouldn't be afraid of experimenting to find the best software for their purposes, and something like Linux Mint is still a great option to recommend to people who are new to Linux.


Replies

simion314yesterday at 9:17 PM

OK, but stop with bullshit that you get more stability because of new packages, you get latest features you read about or watched in some video but you also get the latest bugs, and to get fixes for this latest bugs you will upgrade again in a few months and you get the latest fixes and some new bugs.

There are some valid usecases to use rolling or some bleeding edge distro, like if you want to contribute to KDE or similar project you would want to track latests library versions, but for doing say a web dev job and soem enterteminent an LTS distro works better, you do not upgrade and you have the surprise that GNOME removed yet some new feature you were using, or soem stuff in Plasma broke and now you get a ton of notifications about something not working, or maybe you did not read the Arch forums before upgrading and you had cool package Y that conflicts with cool package Z and now your system is unbootable and you need to fix it instead of doing your actual work. (Arch fans should first Google Arch upgrade briked my system before commenting that this never happened to them).

Btw I used Arch in the past too when I had more free time and loved thinkering with my system.