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Comment by ohazi | Hacker News Reader

> I would prefer to stay on a Debian based distro so PopOS looks promising.

Have you considered using Debian?

Personally, I prefer to run regular updates often and full-system upgrades rarely/never, but I also want to use software that isn't ancient. The LTS model gives me half of those things.

I don't know if that's what you're hinting at with your comment about newer kernels, but I've found the testing and unstable branches of Debian to be a far more pleasant experience overall than Ubuntu (either the LTS or the full-upgrade-every-six-months variants).

They're both rolling releases. Don't let the names fool you... If you follow a small handful of best-practices (e.g. enabling apt-listbugs) they can be quite stable. The system on my old laptop has been running without major issues for almost a decade.

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Any other tips besides apt-listbugs? I've long eschewed Debian because the stable branch is painfully so, I had some bad experiences with testing years ago, and I've felt that unstable was too risky to use as a daily driver.

The other sticking point is ZFS. Guess I'll have to spin up a VM and play around a bit before I switch to Pop! or straight Debian.

Canonical's obsession with snap is about to push me away from *buntu, and I'm ready to bail out. I had misgivings about snap from the first I'd heard about it, and my misgivings are turning out to be well-founded.

Here are the official suggestions:

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUnstable#What_are_some_best_pr...

apt-listbugs is really the main one for me.

When I upgrade, I pay close attention to the package change lists. If packages are set to be removed, especially a lot of important looking packages, I cancel the upgrade and investigate. Usually this means that something has gone wonky with dependencies, or not all of the packages that need to be upgraded in lock-step are available yet. Usually this resolves itself after a few days, but sometimes you can coax a partial upgrade if you find the culprit package and hold it.

Speaking of holding, apt-mark hold/unhold (or equivalent - I think there might be a better way to do this now) is your friend. I usually end up holding packages like the ones mentioned above that erroneously want to remove half the system, as well as any packages that apt-listbugs complains about, unless I've reviewed the bug report and am okay with it. I'll periodically unhold everything (apt-mark showhold | xargs sudo apt-mark unhold), then retry an upgrade to see which bugs or dependencies have been fixed, and then hold any remaining offenders again. Usually this will end up "releasing" package upgrades in chunks depending on the dependency graph.

Apt should probably be louder when big parts of the system get marked for removal. I think this the primary way testing/unstable systems end up breaking, and it's completely avoidable.

I second this, debian testing has been my daily driver for linux for as long as I can remember - I first tried out debian in 1996! But have been using it as a main work OS since about 2007/8.

My current workstation is running my debian OS that's just been continuously updated since about 2012.

My thought process has been in progress over the last 5 years or so. Every time they release a new LTS really.

I have flirted with the idea of using Debian testing as a rolling release but generally ended up back on Ubuntu out of laziness as I liked the happy medium of Ubuntu LTS releases between stableness vs cutting edge while avoiding the typical undercooked Canonical "big bang" changes they have in their .10 releases.

Maybe 20.04 is the release that tips me over the edge!

I tried Debian 10 for several months. It all looks really similar, but that's because of Gnome, or whatever desktop you use. With Ubuntu 20.04 I've turned back to Ubuntu for desktops. Debian is my preferred distro for servers, but Ubuntu just works a lot better on the desktop. It has its issues as well, and I'm not a fan of the snaps. I've compromised because I'm most familiar with Ubuntu, and because it has the best support community with Askubuntu.

I don't care about the default DE that much as I run my own minimal setup, it's more about freshness of packages/kernels and stability for me.

Unbunu provides a nice middle ground between the very stable but very stale Debian (stable) and the and the bleeding edge of something like Arch. Ubuntu does nice stuff like releasing newer kernels for LTS releases but the NIH annoyances have grated on me for the last few years (Mir, Upstart, Snap etc...).

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