I don’t know where my Linux journey takes me next yet, but I only half way agree with this post. Arch is not quite as bad as this post makes it out to be, but there’s definitely always a bit of russian roulette involved in whether your system boots tomorrow or not (most of the time it does).
I just had my EndeavourOS (which is just a thin layer on top of Arch) kill itself and some weird-ass hyperspecific flags in the initrd build process brought it back to life.
Tho in the ~10 years of using arch now I’d say it was still preferable to the extremely stable experience, and I don’t think recommending Debian Stable is such a good idea either.
Yeah I could unfuck my EOS system with a bit of trickery, but once you get a good franken debian going, when that thing breaks there’s no rescue.
I’ve had some stuff on Arch break after an upgrade too because some config variable names changed. I rember when I had KDE with i3 going and one day the desktop was gone. Was just because the variable names in KDE had changed and a quick i3 config change was all that was needed.
Having to selectively install packages from other sources because the main repo will keep you on a too outdated version for 6 months is just not a viable idea in today’s world.
but once you get a good franken debian going, when that thing breaks there’s no rescue.
I found that since Flatpak and Docker became a thing, there’s really not much reason to do frankendebian nowadays. My desktop runs Debian oldstable and it’s just fine.
I was gonna mention docker because I have a feeling it was created partly just to solve this issue, but it really only works for CLI tools and not GUI ones, so I decided against it.
Docker is a bit of a overkill solution but tbf it works really well.
IDK TBH, I have some of those vendor-specific repos too. They usually get disabled on a major release upgrade and then I forget to reenable them … but I think most of these are too self-contained to cause major issues with Debian.
I don’t know where my Linux journey takes me next yet, but I only half way agree with this post. Arch is not quite as bad as this post makes it out to be, but there’s definitely always a bit of russian roulette involved in whether your system boots tomorrow or not (most of the time it does).
I just had my EndeavourOS (which is just a thin layer on top of Arch) kill itself and some weird-ass hyperspecific flags in the initrd build process brought it back to life.
Tho in the ~10 years of using arch now I’d say it was still preferable to the extremely stable experience, and I don’t think recommending Debian Stable is such a good idea either.
Yeah I could unfuck my EOS system with a bit of trickery, but once you get a good franken debian going, when that thing breaks there’s no rescue.
I’ve had some stuff on Arch break after an upgrade too because some config variable names changed. I rember when I had KDE with i3 going and one day the desktop was gone. Was just because the variable names in KDE had changed and a quick i3 config change was all that was needed.
Having to selectively install packages from other sources because the main repo will keep you on a too outdated version for 6 months is just not a viable idea in today’s world.
There are luckily more than just these 2 options.
I found that since Flatpak and Docker became a thing, there’s really not much reason to do frankendebian nowadays. My desktop runs Debian oldstable and it’s just fine.
I was gonna mention docker because I have a feeling it was created partly just to solve this issue, but it really only works for CLI tools and not GUI ones, so I decided against it.
Docker is a bit of a overkill solution but tbf it works really well.
I think I saw some applications with web-GUIs distributed as docker images.
Ye but that’s easy I mean like full-on KDE apps
I do use Docker’s own apt repository so it is up to date though… is that bad?
IDK TBH, I have some of those vendor-specific repos too. They usually get disabled on a major release upgrade and then I forget to reenable them … but I think most of these are too self-contained to cause major issues with Debian.