I have been distro hopping for about 2 weeks now, there’s always something that doesn’t work. I thought I would stick with Debian and now I haven’t been able to make my printer work in it, I think I tried in another distro and it just worked out of the box, but there’s always something that’s broken in every distro.
I’m sorry I’m just venting, do you people think Ubuntu will work for me? I think I will try it next.
I don’t know which people you are listening to, but Debian does not have newer packages than arch. It has older packages than almost all other distros. You can see this on distrowatch for yourself also.
The idea of Debian is that old = stable, which I don’t agree with personally. As an example, users of Debian are reporting tons of KDE Plasma bugs that was already fixed, but because they are running an ancient version, they still have the bugs.
But it depends. It’s correct that new versions of plasma had new bugs, that was fixed in the coming weeks or months.
I guess a better way of describing Debian is that it has old bugs instead of new ones, since it stays on older versions.
The idea is that those bug fixes would be backported as patches; old feature version + new security/bug fixes.
In practice, that’s really expensive to do, so often times bug fixes simply aren’t backported and I don’t even want to know the story of security fixes though I’d hope they do better there.
Debian isn’t old == stable, its tested == stable.
Debian has an effective Rolling distribution through testing than can get ahead of Arch.
At some point they freeze the software versions in testing and look for Release Critical and Major bugs. Once they have shaken everything and submitted fixes where possible. It then becomes stable.
The idea is people have tested a set baseline of software and there are no known major bugs.
For the 4-5 releases Debian has released every 2 years (Similar to Ubuntu LTS). Debian tends to align its release with LTS Kernel and Mesa releases so there have been times the latest stable is running newer versions than Ubuntu and the newest software crown switches between Ubuntu LTS and Debian each year.
For some the priority to run software that won’t have major bugs, that is what Debian, Ubuntu LTS and RHEL offer.
I wouldn’t call a distro “branch” where maintainers say “don’t use this, it’s not officially supported and may even be insecure” an “effective” distribution. I’d consider it a test bed.
* Ubuntu LTS.
Ubuntu’s regular channel releases every 6 months, similar to Fedora or NixOS. That in itself is already a “stable” distro, just not long-time stable (LTS).
So Debian can for a short span of time after release be about as fresh as stable distros which is …kinda obvious? I would not consider a month or so every 2 years to be significant to even mention though, especially if you consider that Debian users aren’t the kind to jump onto a new release early on.
That’s not the point of those distros at all. The point is to have the same features aswell as bugs for longer periods of time. This is because some functionality the user wants could depend on such bugs/unintended behaviour to be present.
The fact that huge regressions have to be weeded out more carefully before release in LTS is obvious if you know that it’d be expected for those “bugs” to remain present throughout the release’s support window.