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Comment by dima55 | Hacker News Reader

Just use Debian. Ubuntu is quite literally Debian+bullshit.

My issue with Debian that I don't want a rolling release, and Debian Stable feels more like "Debian Obsolete" to me (at least it was years ago, maybe now it is different...)

I have used Debian for a while (2-3 years) and do not have that feeling.

It's an LTS, upgrading every two years. No different than many other distros. If you want a more frequently-upgraded distro, consider OpenSuSE Leap (yearly upgrades) or Fedora (upgrades every 6 months).

Debian testing is basically my distro of choice: if sid is the rolling release, and stable is the LTS version, testing is roughly equivalent to non-LTS Ubuntu: the packages have been tested so you don’t usually get breakage, but they aren’t stale.

The packages are somewhat tested, but "you are participating in the development of Debian when you are tracking testing or unstable" [1]. My feeling is Debian testing is a little less stable than non-LTS Ubuntu.

See, I'd like to use LXDE, and right now I use Lubuntu. I'm interested in switching to Debian, but then I read someone say Debian testing is "more stable than the name would suggest, as long as you follow a few reasonable best-practices" [2]. Then I look at these best practices [3] and I'm like, I don't really have time for all that...

But maybe that person is just overly cautious. So I look at Debian's page [1] for best practices and it wants me to use btrfs or LVM snapshots in case an update puts the system into an unrecoverable position. I... don't think I have time for that.

Maybe I can use Debian stable and just get software not available in Debian stable via... snap [4]. Ok, they also list Flatpak and docker, but this is getting frustrating... Is that really the best way to go about this? Because other than snap auto-updating on my machines behind my back, Lubuntu's been working great up to now.

So basically, is there a Ubuntu / Lubuntu that just doesn't have snap auto-updates? If anyone knows, I'd really appreciate it!

[1]: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUnstable#What_are_some_best_pr... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23038222 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23044878 [4]: https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian#Snap

I’ve run Debian testing for like 10 years now, and I’ve never been hesitant to apt-get dist-upgrade.

Good to know. I felt that way about Ubuntu / Lubuntu for that time too, until now. This gives me some confidence about Debian to put some time into trying it out. Thanks!

> My feeling is Debian testing is a little less stable than non-LTS Ubuntu.

At least a few years ago, Ubuntu's LTS releases were derived from Debian Testing, while Ubuntu's standard releases were derived from Debian Unstable.

Oh, didn't know that. That gives me a better sense of "how stable" each is. Thanks!

You can try Fedora, switched from Ubuntu 16.04, never looked back

Check out testing:

  sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
  sed -i 's/buster/testing/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
  sudo apt dist-upgrade

Getting security updates from unstable (not required):

1. Pin unstable lower than testing.

2. Configure apt/debsecan as outlined here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=725934

sounds like you're describing Ubuntu 18.04 :)

NVidia's CUDA only supports Fedora, OpenSUSE, RHEL, CentOS, SLES and Ubuntu, see [1].

So I suppose that rules out Debian (?)

[1] https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads?target_os=Linux&...

I use cuda with Debian and Debian in docker containers and it works fine.

I have the perception (maybe just uneducated guess) that Debian is strictly worse than, say, Arch for personal use. One has to deal with constantly outdated packages, but also with required breaking changes in case of an upgrade from one version to another.

EDIT: I was mostly wrong about the "breaking changes", but this seems like a breaking change: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/c...

Anyway, those release notes are huge, I'd say it is less painful to maintain an Arch system for personal use because of that. You should update/upgrade more often, but the required interventions, if any, are easy.

What I really want is a really stable base OS that's managed totally separately from the individual packages I install. It's the experience one gets with MacOS + Homebrew and it's way better than an "... and the kitchen sink" distro that manages your kernel and basic interface-providing software with the same tool & process that installs and updates Super Tux.

(yes I know there are ways to use another package manager on a given Linux distro, even homebrew, but I'd rather see a strong distro built around that idea, not even trying to provide every-friggin'-thing in the distro's software repos)

The BSDs have that philosophy AFAIK.

Yes, the OS is separate from the rest and the experience much more streamlined than Linux... but it doesn’t support WiFi beyond 802.11n which is too slow for me. If BSD supported modern WiFi I’d have switched to it on my daily laptop long ago!

On sid, I've never had any such issue. I get pretty updated packages and haven't experienced any serious breaking changes, but I also don't do anything that's particularly sensitive or touchy to updates.

Seconding the recommendation for Debian. I switched from Ubuntu Mate to Debian (buster) and the experience is quite smooth; most everything works the same, which is no surprise.

Would Debian be your recommendation for servers as well?

You're joking, right?

In case you are unsure what the sibling means: Debian is primarily a server OS (one of the best). When people talk about Debian, they mostly think about server use.

(That's why your question sounds like a joke :) Or maybe it was a joke?)

Thank you for clarifying! Not intended as a joke :) #noob

I’ve used Ubuntu since the 2000s and never really branched out to explore different distros. I’ve added LWN’s Distributions List [1] to my reading list to lessen my ignorance.

[1]: https://lwn.net/Distributions/

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