What do you consider to be the “Goldilocks” distro? the one that balances ease of install and use, up-to-date, stability, speed, etc… You get the idea.

I’m not a newb, these last few years I’ve lived in the Debian and derivatives side of things, but I’ve used RH, Slackware, Puppy :), and older stuff, like mandrake/mandriva and others. Never tried Suse or Arch, and while Nix looks appealing, I need something to put in production rapidly. I have tried Kinoite in a VM, but I couldn’t install something (which I can’t remember), and that turned me off.

Oh I’m on Mint right now, because lazy, but it’s acting up with a couple of VMs, which I need, I really don’t have the time or desire to maybe spend two days troubleshooting, and I’m a bit fed up with out of date pkgs.

  • superkret@feddit.org
    251·
    2 months ago

    Debian. I run Stable on servers and Unstable on desktops.
    Although I do think OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Arch are actually better in some aspects, I find Tumbleweed too rough around the edges (it’s a derivative of Leap and that shows). And I just can’t be bothered to install and configure Arch anymore. Fedora and Ubuntu are too buggy on average, Mint is too “stable” for a desktop and I don’t use all the helpers that make it newbie-friendly. Slackware suffers from issues that were solved in the Linux world decades ago, and I dislike derivative distros on principle.

    I’ve probably tried around 30-40 distros and I always return to Debian.

    • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
      71·
      2 months ago

      For years I used Debian. Because it worked, but also because Debian looked to me to be the purest and most solid FOSS distro. That is, it’s not run by a for-profit company, and it isn’t a derivative that will go away one day. It looked - still looks - like the “universal” Linux distro, which I believe is even its motto.

      Firstly, is that assessment justified?

      Next: the problem. A few years ago I read a disturbing report about the behind-the-scenes dysfunction at Debian. Specifically:

      • a serious dearth of maintainers
      • lots of very outdated packages with possible untreated security holes
      • silly political wrangling by Debian insiders - one representative allegation was that more time was being spent debating the positioning of a Black Lives Matter logo on the Debian site than on the technical challenges just mentioned

      Possibly this was disinformation by someone with a scurrilous agenda. I want it not to be true because I believe Linux needs a flagship FOSS distro and Debian is the obvious candidate.

      Can anyone set the record straight? Because when I had to do a new install I went with Ubuntu (LTS), and this was partly inspired by the above. I would really like all this to be wrong and to know that Debian is on the right path.

      • superkret@feddit.org
        111·
        2 months ago

        I looked behind the scenes quite a bit in Debian and what you say mirrors what I saw. The project is very political and does suffer from a serious lack of man-(and woman-)power in many areas. If you do want to help, you’re almost immediately hampered by the community’s Byzantine structure.

        If that puts you off, Arch is a more dynamic project that’s easier to get into as a maintainer. But it’s also organized with a more hierarchical and less democratic structure.

        Additionally, you’ll find the issues Debian has all over the FOSS world (The Linux kernel is especially bad). And if you work in corporate IT like I do, you’ll soon notice that proprietary software organisations are no better. There’s software many people depend on maintained by a single overworked and struggling person everywhere you look. Yet it still works somehow. Cause wherever there is demand, a solution is found. And Debian at least has a long-established structure with the goal of finding that solution, even though it’s antiquated.

          • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
            6·
            2 months ago

            This is great news! Debian is back in contention for me.

            Recently Debian developer Helmut Grohne initiated the Debian development discussion around removing more packages from the unstable archive. He argued in favor of more aggressively removing unmaintained packages from the archive given the QA-related costs, additional work/complexities when dealing with major fundamental changes to Debian, and other non-trivial costs

        • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
          24·
          2 months ago

          Useful insight, thanks. And somewhat reassuring.

          I have no intention of using Arch (btw). I’m the kind of insufferable idealist who wants to use Debian for the high-minded principle of it. I consider Arch a toy distro for gamers. :)

      • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
        6·
        2 months ago

        There’s truth to what you’re hearing, all open source software is suffering.

        Part of the allure of rolling releases for the places that have to maintain them is less maintaining! Debian does need maintainers.

        Debian does ship old packages, that’s the point of “stable”, to be tested and known not to cause problems.

        Free software is political. It’s literally not possible for there to have been more time spent discussing what to put on the website than looking for maintainers and updating packages, and part of stability isn’t active testing but instead time spent in active use.

        Debian is on the same path it’s always been on, and reports of its imminent demise are exaggerated.

      • superkret@feddit.org
        71·
        2 months ago

        Tumbleweed includes the YaST package manager with all the repository priority settings that make sense in Leap, but the TW documentation tells you not to use it.
        You can run zypper up which is a standard updating method in Leap, but the TW documentation tells you not to do that. More than half the zypper options make no sense in TW.
        That’s the stuff I mean by “derivative”. They built on a Leap base and modified it into a rolling release.
        If it was truly designed as a new, independent rolling release distro, they’d have taken those things out, packaged a different version of zypper or at least a different manpage.