Comment by aceofspad4s | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aceofspad4s | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Using Debian Stable on a desktop is probably the closer to hell that you could ever get. Imagine to never be able to get that one feature you need because it's only in a more recent version.

The best option for a stable desktop is Gentoo, where you can run old software but then unmask recent stuff if you need it. As a recent example I'll say that MTP support in stable (libmtp) was flaky for my mobile phone. With Debian I would've had to suck dicks in the bug tracker forever to get the fix backported. With Gentoo I just unmask a more recent version et voilà. And that applies to any software you could ever need: you are always going to need more recent versions of certain packages at some point. Stuff that gets fixed, a certain new feature you want, a more recent kernel...

I know someone is going to mention apt pinning but that only works in theory since pinning a more recent version of a certain package usually means you have to update half your packages to unstable because of dependencies. And in that case why even use stable?

>The best option for a stable desktop is Gentoo

Get with the times, gramps. Arch is where the racing stripes are at now. Not held back by all these weird dinosaur architectures Arch can really optimise for superior speed, and features, and modern things, leaving Slackware steamboats, Debian diesels, and Gentoo petrols in the dust, because Arch is the EV of Linux operating systems.

The world of anecdata and pointless optimalisations has transcended Gentoo. You're now the Debian stable of the next generation of Linux users, and boy do they know better!

----

with apologies to any Arch and Gentoo users out there. Your OS is fine. I just thought it was amusing if you look, out of context, at these developments.

I've used Arch years ago. It was a trainwreck. They had a very very bad QA and I had to reinstall every few months. The community is also full of people I wouldn't want to have around, as your own message shows.

Also I don't use Gentoo to get "pointless optimisations". Ricers are the low hanging fruit that's there to be mocked. I use Gentoo because it's the best rolling out there.

> full of people I wouldn't want to have around, as your own message shows.

That's way stronger than anything I intended to say, even if I made a bit of fun of the overly enthusiastic ones.

My joke was based on that way back when, when Gentoo was younger and the hip distro, whenever a thread discussed Debian on the desktop or server, a newly minted Gentoo user would drop by to extol the virtues of Gentoo for every use case possible: "But I use it on servers," "My desktop is so much faster," etc.

Now in this, and similar threads, I notice it's the Arch users who have taken over this function. So when you brought out Gentoo, it felt like a blast from the past, prompting me to accuse you of being "out of touch" for humourous effect. No offence (well, very minor offence) was intended, and I bear no ill will towards either Arch or Gentoo users.

>I've used Arch years ago. It was a trainwreck. They had a very very bad QA and I had to reinstall every few months.

Wow, just about the only OS I've never needed to reinstall is Arch (and I am a 99% Linux user and work and at home). My longest running install is something like 7 years on a desktop, and my laptops tend to die or get replaced on about a 3-4 year cycle.

IMHO the best option currently for a stable OS with up-to-date desktop apps is NixOS. NixOS allows one to have a stable base OS then install packages in the user account from a different channel. Since it uses deterministic builds, the binary caches typically mean no building needs to happen locally. NixOS permits multiple versions of any application/library/dependency to be installed side-by-side, even libc. I run such a configuration and all my desktop packages are completely up-to-date, while my base OS and system components are tracking a stable release.

There is a fundamental difference between system and applications. All common Linux distro unify them into one package management mechanism. Your comment suggests that NixOS is flexible enough to make a split.

Android and iOS clearly separate system and applications and it mostly works fine.

Ubuntu tries to split off applications via snap [0], but so far adoption seems marginal.

[0] https://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/snappy

If I understand NixOS correctly, there is no explicit distinction between system and applications, and everything is handled by the same package management mechanism. The value proposition is in having clean separation between all packages, such that each application can be presented with its own mix of system packages without any conflicts between them.

> each application can be presented with its own mix of system packages without any conflicts between them

Furthermore, everything is done, or in the way to be done, in a functional way: system configuration, deployment, etc.

There are even efforts to manage dotfiles currently getting implemented.

IMHO, the Nix way is a great leap ahead.

"Imagine to never be able to get that one feature you need because it's only in a more recent version."

Everything important has been online for a long time. The web browser refresh button works fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com