22
Distro Focuses
(lemmy.ca)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2024
22 points (95.8% liked)
linuxmemes
21281 readers
758 users here now
Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
- Instance-wide TOS: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
- Lemmy code of conduct: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
2. Be civil
- Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
- Do not harrass or attack users for any reason. This includes using blanket terms, like "every user of thing".
- Don't get baited into back-and-forth insults. We are not animals.
- Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
- Bigotry will not be tolerated.
- These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.
3. Post Linux-related content
- Including Unix and BSD.
- Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of
sudoin Windows. - No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
4. No recent reposts
- Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, <loves/tolerates/hates> systemd, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
5. 🇬🇧 Language/язык/Sprache
- This is primarily an English-speaking community. 🇬🇧🇦🇺🇺🇸
- Comments written in other languages are allowed.
- The substance of a post should be comprehensible for people who only speak English.
- Titles and post bodies written in other languages will be allowed, but only as long as the above rule is observed.
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't remove France.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I'll never stop hating that debian is labeled stable. I'm fully aware that they are using the definition of stable that simply means not updating constantly but the problem is that people conflate that with stability as in unbreaking. Except it's the exact opposite in my experience, I've had apt absolutely obliterate debian systems way too often. Vs pacman on arxh seems to be exceptionally good at avoiding that. Sure the updated package itself could potentially have a bug or cause a problem but I can't think of any instance where the actual process of updating itself is what eviscerated the system like with apt and dpkg.
And even in the event of an update going catastrophically wrong to the point that the system is inoperable I can simply chroot in use a statically built binary pacman and in a oneliner command reinstall ALL native packages in one go which I've never had not fix a borked system from interrupted update or needing a rollback
You are maybe conflating stability with convenience.
"Why is this stable version of my OS unstable when I update and or install new packages...."
The entire OS falling down randomly on every distribution during normal OS background operations was always an issue or worry, and old Debbie Stables was meant to help make linux feel reliable for production server use, and it has done a decent job at it.
I mean when I can take an Arch Linux installation that I forgot about on my server and is now 8 years out of date and simply manually update the key ring and then be up to date without any issue but every time I've ever tried to do many multiple major version jumps on debian it's died horrifically... I would personally call the latter less stable. Or at least less robust lol.
I genuinely think that because Arch Linux is a rolling distribution that it's update process is just somehow more thorough and less likely to explode.
The last one with debian was a buster to bookworm jump. Midway through something went horrifically wrong and dpkg just bailed out. The only problem was that it somehow during all of that removed the entirety of every binary in /bin. Leaving the system completely inoperable and I attempted to Google for a similar solution as arch. Where i could chroot in and fix it with one simple line. But so far as I was able to find there is no such option with apt/dpkg. If I wanted to attempt to recover the system it would have been an entirely manual Endeavor with a lot of pain.
I would also personally label having the tools to recover from catastrophic failure as being an important part of stability especially when people advocate for things like Debian in a server critical environment and actively discourage the use of things like Arch
If the only thing granting at the title of stability is the lack of update frequency that can simply be recreated on Arch Linux by just not updating frequentlyಠ_ಠ
While I personally agree with your sentiment, and much prefer arch to debian for my own systems, there is one way where debian can be more stable. When projects release software with bugs I usually have to deal with those on Arch, even if someone else has already submitted the bug reports upstream and they are already being worked on. There are often periods of a couple of weeks where something is broken - usually nothing big enough to be more than a minor annoyance that I can work around. Admittedly, I could just stop doing updates when everything seems to be working, to stay in a more stable state, but debian is a bit more broadly and thoroughly tested. Although the downside is that when upstream bugs do slip through into debian, they tend to stay there longer than they do on arch. That said, most of those bugs wouldn't get fixed as fast upstream if not for rolling distro users testing things and finding bugs before buggy releases get to non-rolling "stable" distros.
I honestly don't see this thorough testing. Not for a lot of apps I use anyway. It's normal tbf even with 2 year you can't thoroughly test every package for every bug, so you're stuck with very old bugs a lot more often than people think. And on top of that some packages are so old that instructions you find on their git pages or wherever are too new and don't work.
That won't work, old pacman versions can't deal with the fact that packages are now zstandard compressed. In fact, the window were you could successful do the update without a whole bunch of additional work was something like a couple of months. Certainly a whole lot less than a year.
FWIW I've got a Debian server that hosts most of my sites and primary DNS server, that's been running since Etch (4.0, 2007ish). I've upgraded it over the years, switched from a dedicated server to OpenVZ to KVM, and it's still running today on Bookworm. No major issues with upgrades.
It's definitely not something that will happen 100%. I've also had long standing debian systems that seem to not care. However I've had plenty that, for whatever reason couldn't handle multiple major version hops and just eviscerated themselves, I've not had that with arch personally. You may need to download the latest statically built pacman depending on how old it is but that and a keyring update usually has you covered