Maybe what I’m looking for is the holy grail, but what do you guys suggest as a Distro with a good balance between stability and up-to-date packages?

    • Lemmy.ml@lemmy.ml
      11·
      1 year ago

      +1 for Tumbleweed, it works so incredibly well. In the very rare case where an update doesn’t work out for you, you can easily roll back to a previous btrfs snapshot.

      Fedora is quite nice, too, but I’ve come to prefer rolling distros over a release based one.

      Kalpa / Aeon might be interesting, too, if your use case fits an immutable distro.

    • woelkchen@lemmy.world
      81·
      1 year ago

      This or Fedora which per release cycle aims for binary compatibility but happily updates packages if compatibility stays fine.

    • suspectum@lemmy.ml
      4·
      1 year ago

      After many years on Ubuntu I switched to a Tumbleweed and couldn’t be happier. Apparently a rolling distro can be more reliable than a traditional point-release one.

  • space_of_eights@lemmy.ml
    271·
    1 year ago

    What is your definition of stability? I have used Arch for about ten years without any major breakage, but sometimes you do have to do some manual tinkering if a package stops working. So it’s stable enough for me, but maybe not for others. Since it is a rolling release, packages are generally being updated quite rapidly.

    I think that any modern rolling release distro would fit the bill though.

    • Meow.tar.gz@lemmy.goblackcat.com
      93·
      1 year ago

      This here! I actually have had really good luck using Arch. I’ve been running it for only a month now and I make certain to patch/update once a week. Thus far it has not left me stranded. I think Arch is underrated as an OS.

      • aksdb@feddit.de
        16·
        1 year ago

        I think Arch is underrated as an OS.

        I don’t think Arch is anywhere near “underrated”. The “I use Arch, btw” meme didn’t come out of nowhere. A lot of distros are based on Arch too. Even SteamOS (so the Steam Deck is essentially powered by Arch).

        In that regard: yes, Arch is awesome. I use it, btw.

      • what@discuss.tchncs.de
        11·
        1 year ago

        You will only notice the downside of a rolling release distribution when using it for years. Large breaking changes might unexpectedly be applied to your system, instead of at fixed points in time like with other distributions.

  • octalfudge@lemmy.world
    241·
    1 year ago

    I feel like something like Fedora fits the bill: great, reliable, well-maintained repositories, decently updated kernels, yet never faced any major issues, and access to quite updated packages. Only issue is Red Hat caused a stir recently, though I still believe Red Hat does more good than bad in the open source community.

    • rodneyck@lemmy.world
      1410·
      1 year ago

      Red Hat is a corporation, putting dollars first. Not to mention Fedora is now starting to 'trample on user’s privacy with telemetry integration.’

      Some are making the case that Fedora’s new telemetry integration isn’t like the bad telemetry like Google and others, it is ‘anonymised.’ Every corporation says this before they remove the username from the data collected and keep the unique user id. I don’t trust Red Hat…and now with this latest reveal, Fedora either. And privacy is all about trust.

      • NoRecognition84@lemmy.world
        146·
        1 year ago

        Some are making the case that Fedora’s new telemetry integration isn’t like the bad telemetry like Google and others, it is ‘anonymised.’ Every corporation says this before they remove the username from the data collected and keep the unique user id. I don’t trust Red Hat…and now with this latest reveal, Fedora either. And privacy is all about trust.

        Please stop with the FUD about the Fedora telemetry. It is opt-in and is no different than popularity-contest on Debian.

      • DigDoug@lemmy.world
        62·
        1 year ago

        While I admit that the timing with Red Hat’s closed-sourcing is really bad, and I’m also going to start avoiding Fedora for the same reason, saying that opt-in telemetry (that one can literally read the source code of) is “putting dollars first” is really dumb. Do you think the same about Debian’s popularity-contest, which has existed since 2004?

      • QuazarOmega@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 year ago

        I disagree that as the as the article states telemetry “contradicts open-source values”, nowhere is it said in the official definition that telemetry by itself is not ok and as long as it is opt-in and the handler makes clear reports on the data they gathered, I’d say it’s a good opportunity to give valuable insight to the developers on the use of their software, done in this manner it doesn’t trample over anyone’s choices either.
        Notable examples of open source projects that implement telemetry are KDE and Mozilla, it’s not unheard of at all

      • KingKRool@lemmy.world
        31·
        1 year ago

        I’m making that case. I trust Fedora and Red Hat to handle telemetry correctly, but I can verify it by looking at the source and I’ll give them constructive feedback if I have concerns. May I ask which distro you are planning to use where the source is NOT contributed primarily by engineers working for a corporation that puts dollars first?

  • Southern WolfA
    23·
    1 year ago

    OpenSuse Tumbleweed is a great choice for a rolling-release distro that is also really stable too.

    • Zotn (jan Sotan)@lemmy.world
      6·
      1 year ago

      I second OpenSuse Tumbleweed, only switched back to it after 7+ years and it’s been great so far, no packages broke after update so far.

  • xbreak@lemmy.ml
    20·
    1 year ago

    NixOS would fit the bill if you’re not afraid of something different. With Nix it’s trivial to cherry pick from unstable channel if you still want a stable base.

      • Lanthanae@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        2·
        1 year ago

        Is this not solved by using the “unstable” nixpkgs channel or is that something different?

        I’m a NixOS newbie and still learning a lot about it haha

        • 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          The stable branches promise no breaking changes (in configuration options etc.). Unstable is a rolling release with everything that entails (personally I use it on desktops and stable on servers).

      • Justin@lemmy.jlh.name
        2·
        1 year ago

        tbf neither does Fedora.

        But yeah, I would recommend either Debian or NixOS, depending on how stable you want it.

  • Raphael@lemmy.world
    223·
    1 year ago

    The holy grail, stable and up-to-date, it exists, it’s called Debian with Flatpaks.

    Install Debian. Avoid doing any changes to your package selection, try to get things from flatpaks.

    • RegalPotoo@lemmy.world
      7·
      1 year ago

      This is my preferred way off doing things, but trying to glue VSCode + Android Studio + the Flutter SDK + Docker + … together via Flatpack was an exercise in pain and sadness last time I tried it.

      Getting all my normal boring desktop apps via Flatpack is awesome, but for a developer it just doesn’t seem practical right now

      • priapus@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        1 year ago

        If you’re a developer and want a stable distro you’ll need a way to have up to date dev environments. I would use Nix or containers.

    • guyman@lemmy.world
      24·
      1 year ago

      Problem with debian is it’s stable in the sense of unchanging, not necessarily a lack of bugs.

      He’s saying he wants up to date packages and stability, which seems to mean he was current software without bugs. That’s not debian stable.

  • words_number@programming.dev
    171·
    1 year ago

    Debian testing (more up to date than ubuntu, rolling release, much more stable than the name suggests, truly free as in freedom)

    • Aties@lemmy.world
      5·
      1 year ago

      I started using nixos this week and love it; it’s like everything I love about containers made into an OS.

  • DigDoug@lemmy.world
    14·
    1 year ago

    This really depends on your definition of “stability”.

    The technical definition is “software packages don’t change very often”. This is what makes Debian a “stable” distro, and Arch an “unstable” one.

    The more colloquial definition of “stability” is “doesn’t break very often”, which is what people usually mean when they ask for “stable” distributions. The main problem with recommending a distro like this, is that it’s going to depend on you as a user, and also on your hardware.

    I, personally, have used Arch for about 5 years now, and it’s only ever broken because I’ve done something stupid. I stopped doing stupid things, and Arch hasn’t broken since. However, I’ve also spoken to a few people who have had Arch break on them, but 9 times out of 10, they point to the Nvidia driver as the culprit, so it seems you’ll have a better time if you have an AMD GPU, for example.

  • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
    14·
    1 year ago

    Just like the holy grail, a stable and up-to-date distro doesn’t exist. Stability and recency of software typically constitute a tradeoff. Human software developers produce some number of bugs per line of code. Unless all changes made to a piece of software are bug fixes, new changes mean new bugs, almost invariably. Therefore the only way to stop the increase of bugs in a piece of software is to stop the changes to it or only do changes that address bugs. In the context of distros, a stable one is a distro where the number of bugs stays constant or decreases over time. This is how Debian, Ubuntu and every other distro that locks its software versions for a certain release work. After a release is out, only bug fix changes are permitted, with some special exceptions. The idea that there are multiple types of stability is a bit of a false narrative. Adding features, adds lines of code, which increases the number of defects. This is a fundamental fact of software engineering that’s actively managed during the development cycle of most software. A collection of software like a rolling Linux distro that receives a constant stream of new features may feel bug-free to specific users, however that is typically a coincidence. Just because those X number of people didn’t hit any significant defects during their usage, doesn’t mean that you won’t. This is true for every distro, however stable distros generally have an ever-decreasing number of bugs over their lifespan. In addition, bugs that are never fixed can be documented, workarounded and the workarounds will keep working for the lifespan of the release because there are no changes.

    With all of that out of the way I hope it’s clearer why there’s a tradeoff between stability and recency of software in distros. There are various strategies to have a bit of both and they typically revolve around letting the bits you want be recent, while keeping everything else stable. These days the easiest and most foolproof way to get new software is via Flatpak or Snap.

    You could of course abandon stability and go for recency via some rolling release distro and see if you step on any significant bugs. Maybe you won’t and you’ll be happy with that. Many people are.

    As a personal and professional Linux user that lives with and maintains a significant number of machines, I typically go for a stable base like Debian or Ubuntu LTS and update only the software I need via Flatpak, Snap and Docker. I no longer use PPAs. This provides a great balance between stability and recency. But that’s just me.

  • Joseph_Boom@feddit.itOP
    10·
    1 year ago

    Thanks to everyone who commented. After all the suggestions I’m still a bit uncertain on which distro I will use, but now I have basically 2 distro in my mind: Debian and OpenSuse. I will do my researches. Thanks again to everyone, this community really rocks.