The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[prollyanotherlurker]

This gets repeated a lot but isn't true. Yeah, Stable is "old". Testing and Unstable are not, nor is Stable with backports.

I know they have testing, and backports. But why would I use Debian, and not use stable? I would rather just use arch and have their repos if I'm going to do that it has. Or use void, and have a slightly slower rolling release, Gentoo, alpine edge, opensuse tumbleweed, just normal fedora with it's shorter release cycle.

There are so many choices that don't use Debian's normal model, I don't know why you would use Debian over those if you aren't going to follow the way Debian does things by default?

 

[analrapist]

I take it you haven't actually tried this.

I've relied on it in development. Yes, there are snafus, but welcome to glibc's dynamic linking. I take it you don't actually have a use case for this insane behavior you want, given that you chose to be an obtuse shithead instead of a problem solver.

I don't know why you would use Debian over those if you aren't going to follow the way Debian does things by default?

Nigger, I've put more hours on Sid than Stable, and would recommend it before any other .DEB distro other than Stable unless you're an idiot.

 

[WhiteNight]

I know they have testing, and backports. But why would I use Debian, and not use stable?

A lot of people use Debian Sid (Unstable) as their daily driver. It doesn't break that often, and according to the FAQ, "bugs are usually fixed swiftly":

https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/choosing.en.html#s3.1

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Debian's unstable channel is handled with a lot more caution than Arch from my experience. Not that it isn't possible to have a "stable" Arch experience, it just requires best practices more-so than the other distributions in the top five.

 

[teriyakiburns]

I know they have testing, and backports. But why would I use Debian, and not use stable?

Stable is for if you want rock solid, predictable behaviour for long-term appliances or services that won't see the touch of human hands for years at a time. Unstable is "normal", for want of a better word. The sort of position a daily driver OS would occupy; well-tested, not bleeding edge, but mostly up to date. Blame autism for the nomenclature.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

I've relied on it in development. Yes, there are snafus, but welcome to glibc's dynamic linking. I take it you don't actually have a use case for this insane behavior you want, given that you chose to be an obtuse shithead instead of a problem solver.

Nigger, I've put more hours on Sid than Stable, and would recommend it before any other .DEB distro other than Stable unless you're an idiot.

Doesn't really answer why you would use that instead of literally any other distro that does a rolling release by default.

Debian's unstable channel is handled with a lot more caution than Arch from my experience. Not that it isn't possible to have a "stable" Arch experience, it just requires best practices more-so than the other distributions in the top five.

There are quite a few rolling release distros other than arch that I mentioned. That aren't as close to mainline as arch.

I've just ended up using arch because over my time using it. I haven't seen the breakages people talk about.

 

[Slav Power]

Stable is for if you want rock solid, predictable behaviour for long-term appliances or services that won't see the touch of human hands for years at a time. Unstable is "normal", for want of a better word. The sort of position a daily driver OS would occupy; well-tested, not bleeding edge, but mostly up to date. Blame autism for the nomenclature.

Well that explains why I always had a bad time dealing with Debian. Guess I'll try using "Unstable" next time for that Ubuntu/Mint level of "up-to-date enough" experience.

 

[analrapist]

Doesn't really answer why you would use that instead of literally any other distro that does a rolling release by default.

- Because it's the basis for most of the Linux versions people actually use, so when someone gives Linux advice, it's most likely to apply.
- Because you run Debian stable on a server and don't want heterogeneous distroes.

Well that explains why I always had a bad time dealing with Debian. Guess I'll try using "Unstable" next time for that Ubuntu/Mint level of "up-to-date enough" experience.

Again, try Stable plus backports: https://wiki.debian.org/Backports It really deals with most of the "problems" people have with Stable. If you want even more bleeding edge than Sid, there's also Experimental: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianExperimental One of the nice parts about Debian is that you can mix and match from all four of stable, testing, unstable, and experimental, if you're willing to deal with the breakage and know what you're doing.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

Because it's the basis for most of the Linux versions people actually use, so when someone gives Linux advice, it's most likely to apply.

If you are running a systemd distro it's probably going to apply to all of them the same. Unless it's specifically advice about using the package manager or something.

Just like how I use the Arch or Gentoo wiki for answers, even when I'm using a distro other than Arch or Gentoo. You could say the arch wiki is a good reason to use arch. Because generally you can find your answer their without even having to ask someone. But like I said. The information is still applicable to any other distro.

 

[analrapist]

The information is still applicable to any other distro.

Sure, until it isn't. The argument I'm using for Debian here is about these edge cases.

 

[俺たちファームズでノッテる]

Debian's unstable channel is handled with a lot more caution than Arch from my experience. Not that it isn't possible to have a "stable" Arch experience, it just requires best practices more-so than the other distributions in the top five.

That's a fair assessment. Imo if you can find a Arch/Debian Distro that's well maintained and issues quick fixes you seriously have the best of both worlds. CachyOS for me has been my foot in and out of the door of where I have a well maintained distro that can let me fine tune it to my own means. I also heard that the "Debian" style of this is PikaOS.

 

[DavidS877]

I just use Debian Stable, unless I have hardware that's too new, then I use Testing until it becomes Stable. Heck my file server is still on 10. The couple newer things it needs to run like a database or NextCloud are in containers anyway. I did recently upgrade into a bug it seems like though with my laptop, backports kernels seemed to be causing amdgpu crashes, I ended up pulling firmware from experimental and it seems to have stabilized, maybe.

For non-packaged GUI stuff I usually use AppImages. I don't like how Flatpak seems to require a root daemon as well as doing a bunch of other stuff like auto upgrades, I'm sure it can all be turned off, but I just want to download a thing and toss it on my file server and run it from whichever Linux box needs it. And Snap, well, let's just not talk about that. Non-GUI stuff I usually just use containers.

 

[Demonslayer1776]

It's an interesting project, but moving to that over xlibre is pretty retarded if you ask me.

Unless someone knows of an actual technical reason to ever pick that over an actual xorg server. I have a feeling it's not for technical reasons. But hey i could be wrong. And I'm not even someone overly hung up on the xorg being killed thing.

This seems far more forward-thinking from a preservation perspective. Assuming Xorg becomes unviable, a translation layer for older apps may make it easier to keep them usable on wayland when that is the baseline. With that said, if that software becomes completely unmaintained, it will likely struggle to be used on newer linux systems due to other compatibility issues.

 

[Darkholme's Dungeon]

pointless trivia time:

For some reason, Chinese use repeated 6s for applause or something like that.

1) Lucky Number (also, 8888888 )
2) Sounds like "to follow/chain of" as in chain of applause.
666666)))

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

That's a fair assessment. Imo if you can find a Arch/Debian Distro that's well maintained and issues quick fixes you seriously have the best of both worlds. CachyOS for me has been my foot in and out of the door of where I have a well maintained distro that can let me fine tune it to my own means. I also heard that the "Debian" style of this is PikaOS.

that's what I consider gentoo. If someone doesn't want to take advantage of a source based package manager, and the use flag options. you could stay on the desktop profile, not change any flags, and just use binary packages. And it's about as stable of a distro as anything I've ever tried. And even then you can pick between openrc, or systemd, which is nice being able to choose not to use systemd. It's still a rolling release, getting constant updates, but it's pretty well tested in my opinion, it's definitely not bleeding edge.

That said, even if you go with binary packages, you have to be comfortable with a command line install, and reading documentation to get things set up. It has the best installation guide I've seen though so it's really not hard at all. Arches install guide leaves a lot more room for the user to make mistakes if they don't know what they're doing than gentoo's.

Or if someone is fine not using systemd at all. Void pretty similar in stability to gentoo from my experience, and you get a tui installer. Opensuse, and fedora, should be as easy to install as any other distro and should be fairly stable while you get either rolling with tumbleweed, or a fairly fast moving release based distro. With those, I think it might matter what hardware you use, and how much having proprietary drivers matter to you, on how viable they are.

 

[Idontknowanything404why]

I use arch btw

 

[Frederica Bernkastel]

I use arch btw

Kinda forced to, at the moment, because RTX 50xx GPUs only officially work nvidia-open, and Arch is the most painless option for it. Still NVK sucks, and I don't see how RedHat trannies fix it any time soon.

Or if someone is fine not using systemd at all. Void pretty similar in stability to gentoo from my experience, and you get a tui installer. Opensuse, and fedora, should be as easy to install as any other distro and should be fairly stable while you get either rolling with tumbleweed, or a fairly fast moving release based distro. With those, I think it might matter what hardware you use, and how much having proprietary drivers matter to you, on how viable they are.

I've tried Void and have had nothing but issues with the touchpad firmware deciding not to load after reboots, or the internet randomly going out. I don't think it's a hardware issue since it never happened on Alpine. Non-systemds distros almost always have manual intervention quirks systemd distros don't have, and that can waste a lot of unnecessary time.

Speaking of edge cases, I'm also surprised no one has mentioned Devuan.

 

[innocent jogger]

Is there an archive manager that just fucking works? I am using EndeavourOS and file-roller has been updated and improved by removing the drag and drop to extract feature. Insert "use case for drag and drop to extract" meme here.
I switched to xarchiver for some time but this too fails to extract by drag and drop 80% of the time. I am very close to just extracting stuff by terminal at this point.

The "improved" file-roller is fucking dog shit. I used it for years because it integrated smoothly into PCManFM, now half the functionality has been stripped out...for reasons?? You used to be able to select a compression level for formats that supported it too. And of course the gui is i a big ugly gnome window too.

I'm so sick of good software being de-evolved into crapware.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

Non-systemds distros almost always have manual intervention quirks systemd distros don't have, and that can waste a lot of unnecessary time.

Like what?

And the void thing sounds unlucky, I guess. I never experienced anything like that with it. It was pretty much like my experience with arch, which is to say. Things tended to just work. Outside of using their musl version at least.

 

[Slav Power]

Is there an archive manager that just fucking works? I am using EndeavourOS and file-roller has been updated and improved by removing the drag and drop to extract feature. Insert "use case for drag and drop to extract" meme here.
I switched to xarchiver for some time but this too fails to extract by drag and drop 80% of the time. I am very close to just extracting stuff by terminal at this point.

Take the OFM pill, where your file manager is an archive manager, and it handles archives much like folders. Double Commander, Krusader, Midnight Commander, choose your poison.