Those who don’t have the time or appetite to tweak/modify/troubleshoot their computers: What is your setup for a reliable and low-maintenance system?
Context:
I switched to Linux a couple of years ago (Debian 11/12). It took me a little while to learn new software and get things set up how I wanted, which I did and was fine.
I’ve had to replace my laptop though and install a distro (Fedora 41) with a newer kernel to make it work but even so, have had to fix a number of issues. This has also coincided with me having a lot less free time and being less interested in crafting my system and more interested in using it efficiently for tasks and creativity. I believe Debian 13 will have a new enough kernel to support my hardware out of the box and although it will still be a hassle for me to reinstall my OS again, I like the idea of getting it over with, starting again with something thoroughly tested and then not having to really touch anything for a couple of years. I don’t need the latest software at all times.
I know there are others here who have similar priorities, whether due to time constraints, age etc.
Do you have any other recommendations?
Peppermint , based on debian (also a devuan flavor). “Everything you need and nothing you don’t”
Xubuntu LTS. I’ve been meaning to switch to Debian Stable when something breaks, but it’s my third LTS on the desktop and 5th on the laptop and there was just no opportunity. I also learned to avoid PPAs and other 3rd party repos, and just use appimages when possible.
You can have a kernel from Testing or even Sid, I believe, but yeah, it’s what we want to avoid - tweaking.
LTS is released every 2 years, for reference.
This is the way. The uBlue derivatives benefit from the most shared knowledge and problem-solving skills being delivered directly to users.
Between that, and using a decorative distrobox config, I get an actually reliable system with packages from any distro I want.
Doesn’t ucore also have to restart to apply updates?
Not super ideal for a server as far as maintenance and uptime to have unexpected, frequent restarts as opposed to in-place updates, unless one’s startup is completely automated and drives are on-device keyfile decrypted, but that probably fits some threat models for security.
The desktop versions are great!
Not super ideal for a server as far as maintenance and uptime to have unexpected, frequent restarts
This is such a weird take given that 99.9% of people here are just running this on their home servers which aren’t dictated by a SLA, so it’s not like people need to worry about reboots. Just reboot once a month unless there’s some odd CVE you need to hit sooner than later.
That is very fair!!
But on the other hand, 99.9% of users don’t read all of the change notes for their packages and don’t have notifications for CVEs. In that case, in my opinion just doing updates as they come would be easier and safer.
So why would somebody run that on their homeserver compared to tried and true staples with tons of documentation? 🍿
It’s just Fedora CoreOS with some small quality-of-life packages added to the build.
There’s tons of documentation for CoreOS and it’s been around for more than a decade.
If you’re running a container workload, it can’t be beat in my opinion. All the security and configuration issues are handled for you, which is especially ideal for a home user who is generally not a security expert.
You’re right, they should be running Windows Server as God intended 😆
They won’t apply unexpectedly, so you can reboot at a time that suits. Unless there’s a specific security risk there’s no need to apply them frequently. Total downtime is the length of a restart, which is also nice and easy.
It won’t fit every use-case, but if you’re looking for a zero-maintenance containerized-workload option, it can’t be beat.
Run k3s on top and run your stateless services on a lightweight kubernetes, then you won’t care you have to reboot your hosts to apply updates?
deleted by creator
Yeah, sure. I was running Bluefin-DX. One day image maintainers decided to replace something and things break. UBlue is an amazing project. Team is trying hard but it’s definitely not zero mainainace. I fear they are chasing so many UBlue flavours, recently an LTS one based on CoreOS, spreading thin.
If you depend on third party modules you’ll end up with third party maintenance - we didn’t purposely decide to break this we don’t work at Nvidia.
Jorge, OP asked about “not having to really touch anything for a couple of years”. I am just sharing my experience. Big fan of containers and really appreciate your efforts of pulling containers tech into Linux desktop. Thank you!
I don’t understand the answer though. Maybe I am missing something here. There’s an official Bluefin-DX-Nvidia iso. Nvidia-containers-toolkit was part of that iso.
On a separate note, I liked the idea of GTS edition. Since few weeks ago iso became unavailable pending some fix. At the same time I see loads of new LTS edition buzz. It’s still in Alpha though. I feel confused.
I don’t understand the answer though.
The answer is if you’re depending on software that is closed and out of your control (aka. you have an Nvidia card) then you should have support expectations around that hardware and linux.
There are no GTS ISOs because we don’t have a reliable way to make ISOs (the ones we have now are workarounds) but that should be finished soon.
Thanks for clarifying, Jorge. I wish I lived in a perfect world where all hardware and software follow FOSS principles. Until then I will have to rely on the other distros that embrace an imperfect reality. I cannot reconcile how Bluefin targets developers and NVidia, unfortunately is not something many of those developers can afford to ignore. Good luck with your project!
I cannot reconcile
It’s like a saving throw in a video game, most times you can make it, but every once in a while you don’t lol.
🤷 I’ve been running Aurora and uCore for over a year and have yet to do any maintenance.
You can roll back to the previous working build by simply restarting, it’s pretty much the easiest fix ever and still zero maintenance (since you didn’t have to reconfigure or troubleshoot anything, just restart).
Running exotic niche server images out in the wild…
It’s just Fedora CoreOS with some QoL packages added at build time. Not niche at all. The very minor changes made are all transparent on GitHub.
Choose CoreOS if you prefer, it’s equally zero maintenance.
The thing with Debian is that yes, it’s the most stable distro family, but stable != “just works”, especially when talking about a PC and not a server (as a PC is more likely to need additional hardware drivers). Furthermore, when the time comes that you DO want to upgrade Debian to a newer version, it’s one of the more painful distros to do so.
I think fedora is a good compromise there. It’s unstable compared to RHEL, but it’s generally well-vetted and won’t cause a serious headache once every few years like Debian.
What makes Debian 12 a painful distro to upgrade?
I don’t understand that comment either. I’ve been using Debian for years on my server, and it just keeps up with the times (well with Debian times, not necessarily current times).
It’s way easier than Kubuntu was for me, for example, which required reinstalling practically every time I wanted to upgrade. A few times the upgrade actually worked, but most of the time I had to reinstall.
Debian as a server is fine and probably the best ! However as a daily drive OS I don’t think it’s the best choice.
I have always seen Debian as server distro and that’s probably what they meant ?
I have debian as my server distro since the beginning of my Linux journey (NEVER failed me !) However I can’t see how Debian as daily drive is a good idea. Sure they try to catch up with testing repo for those who wan’t a more up to date distro, but it’s seems harder to keep up when something breaks along the way.
That’s where Arch and derivatives shine, if something goes wrong it’s fixed in a few days.
I’ve been daily driving it on my desktop and laptop for several months now, seems fine. But I don’t need the bleeding edge either.
But that’s not what the comment was about… The top level comment said Debian was hard to upgrade, and I have not had that experience.
Specifically upgrading major versions. See the official documentation for upgrading Debian 11 to 12. It’s far more involved than minor version upgrades.
https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/amd64/release-notes/ch-upgrading.html
This is what I’ve always done. It has worked fine for me every time.
Even then, there’s a warning that the upgrade process can take several hours. Even if it’s largely hands off, that’s not exactly my image of an easy upgrade.
The problem is when it comes time for a major version upgrade. Debian 12.10.0 to 12.11.0 probably won’t be a big deal. But upgrading from Debian 11 to 12 was a pain. Debian 12 to 13 will probably be a pain as well.
In what way? I haven’t upgraded between major releases on Debian before.
Here’s the official documentation for upgrading from Debian 11 to 12. The TL;DR is that it takes 8 chapters to describe the process.
https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/amd64/release-notes/ch-upgrading.html
I’ve been running Manjaro for the last 4 months and it’s been incredibly reliable and smooth. I haven’t done any serious tweaking beyond installing a realtime audio kernal. I run updates every few days and I haven’t had a single issue so far.
Edit: what’s up with the down voting? If there’s something incorrect with recommending Manjaro in this context, I’d love to know why, since I’m still relatively new to Linux.
Are you using the liquorix kernel?
I can only see one downvote and four upvotes from here - I think you’re good!
Get a big mainstream distro and stop tinkering with it.
This really is the answer. The more services you add, the more of your attention they will require. Granted, for most services already integrated into the distro’s repo, the added admin overhead will likely be minimal, but it can add up. That’s not to say the admin overhead can’t be addressed. That’s why scripting and crons, among some other utilities, exist!
i think its more about modifying the system behavior, esp on desktop oses. i have many local services running on my server, and if set up right, its pretty much no maintenance at all.
i want to try another distro than ubuntu, but the damn thing isnt giving me a single excuse to format my system. it doesnt break if you don’t fuck with it.
Such a bad comment, what does tinkering mean? Not use any software besides the default one? So only browsing and text apps? facepalm
Tinkering, in my personal definition, would mean installing third party repositories for the package manager (or something like the AUR on Arch) or performing configuration changes on the system level… Just keep away as most as possible from accessing the root user (including su/sudo) is a general a good advice I would say.
Keeping away from sudo, got it.
If you want to take that from my text then feel free.
- yet another vote for Debian Stable
- second the comment on: if you need a newer kernel for hardware reasons, use backports
- Xfce
- stick to flatpaks when dealing with wanting to try out a new program (if you like it, then make the decision to use apt or not)
- don’t confuse “hasn’t been updated” with “hasn’t needed to be updated”
I’ve been distro hopping for decades. I got exhausted with things constantly breaking. I’ve been using mint for the past six months with zero issues. It’s so refreshing that everything just works.
I second Mint. I’ve installed it on my laptop with zero issues, although that thing is pretty old so your mileage may vary on newer hardware. But mint comes with pretty up to date kernels these days so it’s definitely worth a try.
Same here. I got to a point I wanted to use the OS rather than play with and fix it. Went back to Mint and stayed there.
Every time I stray from Mint I am reminded why I go back to it.
If you like debian and just need a newer kernel you could just add backports to your debian install then install the kernel during the install process.
Debian stable + XFCE for me. Missing newer packages though. I’m interested in what problems you had with Fedora
This! Debian with Gnome or others is the answer. Take an afternoon to make it yours, then forget it. You can use backported kernels on Debian, to support newer hardware. Try this or upgrade to Debian 13 right now by changing the sourcefile to trixie instead of bookworm. Note : if you use Gnome, let gnome-software handle the updates for you (there’s an equivalent for kde). If you use others, configure unattented-upgrades for automatic updates.
I had problems with waking from sleep/hibernate, audio issues (total dropouts as well as distortion in screen-recording apps), choppy video playback and refusal to enter fullscreen, wonky cursor scaling, apps not working as expected or not running at all. I’ve managed to fix most of these or find temporary workarounds (grateful for flatpaks for once!) or alternative applications. But the experience was not fun, particularly as there was only a 2 week return window for the laptop and I needed to be sure the problems weren’t hardware design/choice related. And I’m finding it 50/50 whether an app actually works when I install it from the repo. There’s a lot less documentation for manually installing things as well and DNF is slow compared to apt…
I don’t want to say for certain that Fedora as a distro is to blame but I suspect that it is. I miss my Debian days.
(grateful for flatpaks for once!)
That’s how I run my system right now. Fedora KDE + pretty much everything as Flatpak.
Gives me a recent enough kernel and KDE version so I don’t have to worry when I get new hardware or new features drop but also restricts major updates to new Fedora versions so I can hold those back for a few weeks.
I made a similar switch as you but from Ubuntu to Fedora because of outdated firmware and kernel.
I had problems with waking from sleep/hibernate
what graphics do you have? Don’t expect that to go away with nvidia. no such issues on AMD though, intel should be fine though
Intel Arc integrated graphics.
Let’s hope Debian fits you. I had to change to an Intel WiFi card but everything else worked OOTB for me on my laptop
fedora has been this for myself. maybe tweaking every now and then to fix whatever edge cases I’ve run into but it’s the least painful distro I’ve used so far
Debian XFCE or Xubuntu LTS.
xfce is stubbornly slow at introducing new features, but it is absolutely rock-solid. Hell I don’t think they’ve changed their icon set in some 20 years.
Debian and *buntu LTS are also likewise slow feature updaters that focus on stability.
Ubuntu. It’s boring but it all works.
Ubuntu is literally just Debian unstable with a bunch of patches. Literally every time I’ve been forced to use it, it’s been broken in at least a few obvious places.
So, you are saying Debian is the better choice, right?
Ubuntu comes with non-free drivers which can make it easier to set up and use. I use Debian on my server and Ubuntu on my laptops. They have both been pretty reliable for me. LTS versions of Ubuntu are pretty bug free but have older versions of software. I’d guess that Daniel was using a non-LTS release which are a bit more bleeding edge. The LTS ones strike a good balance between modernity and stability.
Absolutely. I’ve been running Debian for literally decades both personally & professionally (on servers) and it’s rock-solid.
On the desktop, it’s also very stable, but holy-fuck is it old. I’m happy to accept the occasionally bug in exchange for modern software though, so I use Arch (btw) on the desktop.
I am currently using an recent version of Ubuntu live USB for backups and a “serious” error window pops up every time I boot it. Same experience with Ubuntu installations. For me at least, Ubuntu isn’t anything close to stable.
Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is my pick.
I’ve got two study laptops and apart from Tailscale giving me some grief very recently with DNS resolution, I literally haven’t had any problems with either machine. Both have been going for 1.5 years.
I like the LMDE route for the DE already having pretty decent defaults and not requiring much tweaking from the get-go. Xfce (as it ships by default in Debian) absolutely works, but I end up spending an hour theming it and adding panel applets and rearranging everything so that it… ends up looking similar to Cinnamon anyway, because default Xfce looks horrible in my opinion
I am a longtime fan of Debian Stable, for exactly that reason. I installed the XFCE version using the custom installer about 8 years ago and have had very few issues.
Initially my GPU wasn’t well supported so I had to use the installer from Nvidia, forcing me to manually reinstall the driver after every kernel update. That issue has been fixed in recent years so now I can just use the driver from the Debian repos.
I installed the unattended-updates package about 2 years ago and it has been smooth sailing since
