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?
openSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s not stable as in unchanging but it is stable as in reliable.
+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.
Having tried many over the years, there is truly nothing as good as Tumbleweed.
@blackstripes @MyNameIsRichard this one is also great out of the context! (sorry!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@NoRecognition84 @rodneyck its bad anyway. Why a opensource project will do something like that? Telemetry causes bad performance in production. If its opt in, no one will activate, and soon the business will force its use.
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?
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
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?
@rodneyck @octalfudge
that’s very bad news. #fedora is a nice distribution, but telemetry leads the machine to bad perform.
OpenSuse Tumbleweed is a great choice for a rolling-release distro that is also really stable too.
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.
It gets close, but NixOS doesn’t have LTS releases yet, so you’ll still be updating at least every six months. Combining the Nix package manager with a Debian stable or Ubuntu LTS might be an option, that gives you a stable base and a few up to date packages on top. However integrating the Nix packages with Debian can get tricky when it comes to core packages such as window manager or DE.
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
The NixOS unstable channel allows you to get the new packages, but what OP wants is also a stable system and NixOS doesn’t really offer. NixOS has new releases every six months and only provides security updates for one month after a new release is out. So you’ll be updating pretty frequently and things do break in those updates pretty frequently.
Ubuntu LTS in contrast promises security updates for up to 10 years and they have LTS releases every 2 years. So you can basically install it once and forget about it. The downside is that Ubuntu has no way to install new software on the old system by itself, which is why a mix of Ubuntu LTS and Nix might be worth a consideration in some situations, that gives you both a stable base and bleeding edge software.
