I’m ditching Ubuntu for Debian. But I’m wondering if I shouldn’t use Debian Testing instead of Stable to get more updated software.

Tuxedo OS is going to rebase their distro on Debian Testing, and I’ve heard that it’s actually pretty stable for a non-stable distro, which is why I’m considering it. But, I want your hear about your experience. What kind of trouble do you frequently run into? Any traps I should look out for?

I really want something that’s going to be no-fuss, solid as a rock and that’s simply going to get out of my way. I don’t have time to troubleshoot my PC after a whole ass day of troubleshooting some company’s software shit.

Before you tell me to switch to whatever other distro, I’m not interested. I want to use Debian. I’m used to it’s packaging system and how it’s set up and I know it’s a super stable distro. And I fully support the people behind it and their social contract.

  • moonpiedumplings@programming.devEnglish
    31·
    2 days ago

    Please don’t use Debian Testing. It doesn’t receive security updates in a timely manner. I previously made a post about it:

    PSA: You should know that Debian Testing does not receive security updates in a timely manner, and is not intended for production use.

    Unlike Debian Unstable or Debian Stable, there is no fast track for vulnerability fixes needed into Debian testing. In my post above, I note that Debian stable and unstable received a fix for a very severe vulnerability. However, Debian testing was left to dry for almost a week, for a known critical vulnerability.

    If you want more updated applications, you can use tools like flatpak, distrobox, appimage, or nix to layer newer applications onto a system of any Linux distro.

    If you want newer base packages and underlying utilities, like a newer desktop environment, you can get stable distros that provide this, like Fedora, or Opensuse Leap.

    Unfortunately it is still in Beta, but Opensuse Slowroll is OpenSuse’s solution, a rolling release that delays package updates to test and iron out bugs before pushing updated versions out. It’s somewhat of an in between a rolling release and a stable distro, and a very promising model.

    You can also just directly use a rolling release distro. Debian Unstable isn’t as bad as it sounds. Unstable doesn’t mean unreliable or prone to breakages. Unstable just means that the bugs deal with will constantly be changing, instead of dealing with the same bugs all the time.

    But please don’t use Debian Testing. It’s in the name, it’s only for testing purposes.

    • ZombieCyborgFromOuterSpace@piefed.caOPEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      Oh man ok. Thank you so much for this.

      I guess I’ll stick with stable. Even if that means missing out on latest KDE Plasma features. I can wait a couple of years.

      • moonpiedumplings@programming.devEnglish
        1·
        3 hours ago

        Depending on how desperate you are, and if you are willing to delve into the dark arts, there are ways to get new KDE on stable distros. It’s probably way more effort than it’s worth, however, and I wouldn’t really recommend them to most users, due to the steep learning curve and various limitations. However, if I were to ever build a Linux distro, then I might consider them, as a way to mix and match older and newer packages.

        I will also preface that KDE Plasma is one the more unreliable and prone to breakages part of my Linux system (Arch). People like to joke about krashes, but it’s kinda true. The bottom bar likes to crash sometimes, and I then I have to run systemctl --user restart plasma-plasmashell (the fact that I have that memorized scares me). KDE never really stops working overall, but various papercuts appear which I find workarounds for. Gnome is better though, and is much more reliable, IF you aren’t using extensions that aren’t officially supported, which often break on major Gnome updates. It’s probably because of that that Arch Linux sat on the Gnome update for a bit, to wait for the extensions to update and become compatible, whereas Fedora just said YOLO and pulled the trigger lmao. However, Gnome’s harder dependency on systemd might make it tough to drag a newer version onto another distro using the methods mentioned below.

        The 3 ways I can think of (in order of how much I prefer them):

        1. The Nix package manager can install recent packages from Nixos’s rolling release or more up to date stable distro on other distros.

        Nixos is both a distro and a package manager, and their repos include things like desktop environments, that wouldn’t normally be included in solutions like brew. In fact [Hyprland’s wiki has a guide on using Nix to install Hyperland on non Nixos distros](https://wiki.hypr.land/Nix/Hyprland-on-other-distros/. This will not work for KDE however. By default, Nix packages on other distros don’t have GPU hardware acceleration, which is kinda needed for a DE. You would have to wrap these packages via Nixgl. The best way is to use home manager and use that to wrap the packages.

        Wait, it looks like the docs have been updated: https://home-manager.dev/manual/unstable/usage/gpu-non-nixos.html#sec-usage-gpu-non-nixos . If you are using home manager, it looks like GPU wrapping is automatically enabled if you set targets.genericLinux.enable to true, although this requires root.

        Then you would have to do some stuff to setup the login manager so that it can detect the Nix/home-manger version of KDE.

        1. Bedrock Linux let’s you install multiple Linux distros at once, next to eachother, mixing and matching packages and utilities.

        With bedrock, you could use a Debian base system, using the Debian bootloader, kernel, and systemd, but you could be getting your DE components from Arch. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support many things or distros (see pre installation checks), and some of the things like grub + btrfs would suck to lose.

        1. Distroxbox can run an entire desktop environment from within another docker container.

        The main limitations with this setup, is that you are now inside the container by default. If you execute bash, or a terminal, or whatever, it’s actually the container’s version, and not the hosts. You can configure it to automatically find and execute the host’s version of the program if it’s not found in the container. But, I would prefer just cherrypicking the DE from another distro, in order to use only that component, which is why this one is third and my least favored. But it does technically work.

    • vanillama@programming.dev
      6·
      1 day ago

      I ran debian testing for a while and I agree with this advice. I hadn’t bothered to read that the debian website itself said testing isn’t meant to be used like I was using it lol.

      I think Debian stable is awesome and it’s what I’m running atm, but for people who want or need newer packages I agree it’d be better to go with a rolling release or at least with a distribution that has a quicker release cycle (like Fedora).

    • thingsiplay@lemmy.ml
      6·
      2 days ago

      You can also just directly use a rolling release distro. Debian Unstable isn’t as bad as it sounds. Unstable doesn’t mean unreliable or prone to breakages. Unstable just means that the bugs deal with will constantly be changing, instead of dealing with the same bugs all the time.

      “Unstable” is one of the terms in the IT, that has multiple meanings. Those who don’t know, might confuse the term “unstable” with “broken”, when it actually means “Changing” (at a high level spoken). Its not about the bugs changing, but more about compatibility and changes that drastically could alter a system. Regardless of the model, security issues and often bugs are still being patched. For a “stable” distribution, this would be all it does.

    • ExtremeUnicorn@feddit.org
      3·
      2 days ago

      To add to this, there is always the debian backports repository, which receives major updates for things such as office, BTRFS progs and other common software.

    • Cris_Citrus@piefed.zipEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      I get the advice that you can use flatpak if you want more up to date applications but what if I want an up to date version of gnome? :/ as an UI UX nerd honestly I care more about getting to use the best version of the desktop interface I’m using.

      I wish there was a good totally independent distro for my needs. Debian gives an old version of your DE and doesnt ship vanilla packages, arch is very roll-your-own and more likely to experience breakage than fits me, void has honestly been the closest. I’m just not really fit for trying to set up and maintain a minimal distro, and honestly with gnome building more and more sysd dependencies I dunno if they’ll keep building work-arounds so gnome is usable. Sadly I’m very tied to gnome, in spite of the project being managed… Differently from how I would like to see it managed 🥲

      • poinck@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 day ago

        Then Fedora might be for you. They have also the Silverblue immutable variant. I am currently testing it on second work PC. It doesn’t get so much use like my main Debian stable box, but I consider it for easy to maintain machines for clients.

        • Cris_Citrus@piefed.zipEnglish
          1·
          23 hours ago

          By totally independent distro I mean not tied to a corporate project (like rhel for fedora). Fedora is currently what I’m using, though honestly I’m experiencing a fair bit of jank and wondering if I broke stuff with my customization 😅

    • thingsiplay@lemmy.ml
      2·
      2 days ago

      OpenSuse’s solution, a rolling release that delays package updates to test and iron out bugs before pushing updated versions out.

      Kind of what Manjaro does with the Arch base. Could be called slowroll too, as it is a rolling release with packages holding back and releasing them at once after some time. The idea is to test them before release, but I’m not sure if the Manjaro team does or did a great job at this in the past (years ago when I used it). The big problem with Manjaro was if you used the AUR, which always expected the current and newest packages without holding back. I guess OpenSUSE does not have such a problem, right?