https://github.com/ublue-os/countme/blob/main/growth_global.svg
Graphs can be found here on their github. Since around mid November the active user count for Bazzite has gone up by around 16k active users.
Personally, my only wish for Bazzite is a Cosmic version š¼ I tried it out recently and it seems fairly impressive
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by AlpƔr-Etele MƩder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
In my experience, Debian has been very low maintenance. Occasionally, you may run into an issue that would be solved by having newer packages. If that happens, consider switching to Fedora.
My Fedora installations have been pretty smooth. The only thing that always breaks randomly is the software update GUI. I just got fed up with that and ended up using the terminal for installing all updates. Apparently this distro requires a bit more maintenance.
My experience as well with my Arch installations after a decade with that distro. I run a system upgrade because I want to, not because I need to. Never does it break unless I'm careless when upgrading and not checking the news page beforehand, which you are supposed to do. As long as I play by the rules, it's super stable. (Never did it break for me anyway though. Never happened apart from hardware failure.)
Although admittedly I almost never do check the news page before upgrading, but/because there's rarely anything there. And after a while you learn to recognize the volatile packages which can break your system, so e.g. if
systemdhas an update I'll check the page before hitting enter, and so on.Remember this one from 2022?
Yeah, that one ended up being a learning experienceā¦ After recovering from that dumb misadventure, I finally learned to take those announcements more seriously.
Yeah, vaguely š I use syslinux for booting, habit from when I used to dual boot, so I was luckily not affected. But yes, it is definitely wise to check the news before upgrading system-critical packages!
I can't be bothered to update every day, or even every week. LOL. More like once a month or so, which means that it's usually 100 MB or more and there's at least one package that is more or less critical. When I start updating, and before hitting Y, I pause for a second and realise I should totally check the news first. Usually, it's fine, but over the years, there have been a few times when intervention was necessary.
If you only update once a month (which should be fine as well, definitely), then you only need to check the news page once a month too, less often than I do probably. š Seems like a win-win. š
You can also selectively update packages of course, but this is strongly ill-advised unless you know what you're doing.
But like,
doas pacman -Sy firefoxshould be fine...You didn't hear it from me. š¤š„ø
The āunless you know what youāre doingā part tells me itās totally worth it in some highly exceptional situations. You just need to be able to justify spending a few hours to figure out exactly how to do it safely.
Best thing about Linux is that you can do literally anything you want. If it works, itās awesome. If you break your system, you get to keep the pieces and learn something new along the way.
Iām utilizing this liberty by being a lazy admin who updates things like eventuallyā¢ or soonā¢. Havenāt learned any hard lessons yet, so I guess itās ok. Or maybe I just know what Iām doingā¦
Agreed. š Arch and pacman definitely adheres to this philosophy of "unless you know what you're doing". Pacman allows this type of selective upgrade, and it allows to ignore any package you like during a system/all-package upgrade, which may or may not break the system.
You can also post-install make changes to the database of installed packages, like change the install reason for a package (as a dependency or as explicitly installed).
All these things are happily executed without warning. š
The reason for the need to check the news is that the system can have any combination of package versions installed, and requiring manual intervention by the user in any quirky upgrade situations helps to keep the complexity down of the system and package manager. I think it's worth the low complexity.
The overhead of checking the website is super low. It's basically the same as checking the release notes when there's a new version of Ubuntu, or whatever other software you might be curious of. Same thing.