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Comment by WD-42 | Hacker News Reader

> I care about a particular piece of software because it's the reason I use a computer (go, Emacs, Node, etc.) then I just have to maintain it myself. There simply isn't a good way right now.

Don’t do this to yourself! Debian is not going to give you bleeding edge. But there are plenty of distros that can. Despite being a meme, Arch Linux is one of the best distros available, and has been for years. Node, golang, are usually updated within hours of upstream, while the core system remains stable. If you’re looking for something more modern, Solus has been gaining popularity and also has relatively up to date packages. Debian is great for servers.

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Arch has two major differences from Ubuntu and other non-rolling distributions.

1. You're using latest upstream, after it passed through the archlinux-testing repository. This means you won't have to install software from somewhere else just because the repos are outdated. (nighly builds of software are different)

2. Sometimes you have to sys-upgrade to install/fix something, and you don't have much say in when that happens. Typically you need to preemptively do this about once a week to not potentially get interrupted by manual intervention at a bad time. Yes, you will need to do manual intervention, but you won't spend much time on it. It's far less work than getting up-to-date software running on your debian stable.

my favorite part of arch is using the AUR and customizing PKGBUILDS to suit my needs. I recently was messing around trying to get the emacs native-comp development branch built on my machine. I was running into some issues, then tried in an ubuntu container. Eventually I just fired up my Arch VM, found an AUR package for it, tweaked the PKGBUILD options and dependencies for my needs, and then had it compile on the first try. The build worked great, and once I'd native-compiled everything in my emacs configs, it was super fast to start up even in the VM.

Arch will give you small issues every now and then, but it gives you the tolls to fix them and makes it easy to do things that are much more difficult on other distros.

I can't really agree, to be fair it's been about 5 years since I stopped using Arch so things may very well have improved. But my experience using it as my daily driver on my work ThinkPad was that I kept running into quite a lot of problems every other week from upgrades breaking things, it was of course always fixable but probably spent a few hours every month just on maintenance, this is fine for me on a hobby machine at home but not really something I want in a worn environment. I'm not particular fond of Ubuntu either, it was fine in the 00s but then they lost it, nowadays I primarily use 3 operating systems, FreeBSD, Debian and macOS, they all are somewhat "boring" but also tends to mostly keep working without bothering me to much and most things are easy to look up and well documented.

Debian absolutely can give you bleeding edge if you just change your repos from their stable release to testing or sid/unstable. Same thing applies to Fedora and pretty much every major Linux distribution.

Sure it technically can. But it’s not how the distro is designed. The testing repos are meant for just that: testing. I’ve run Sid and always had issues with major version upgrades. Rolling release is just a better model IMO.

The point of using Debian or Ubuntu lts is the reverse of getting bleeding edge software. Sure you want your browser and a couple of other software to be up to date but the reset should stay the same and only have critical/minor updates.

If you need more control over versions, NixOS is by and far the best choice. You can mix and match versions of software from stable & unstable, depending on your needs.

Manjaro is a really great option too, if you want something Arch flavored that’s a bit more user friendly.

Definitely this. Manjaro is out-of-the-box ready, but based on Arch. Manjaro stable is also two more testing steps away from Arch, so the packages are less likely to cause issues. And there are four sources for software: Manjaro repos, the AUR, flatpacks, and snaps. I have never been in a situation where I could not install the latest software via one of those routes. I ran Debian for years and often ran into situations where new software was just not installable due to library incompatibility, etc. Manjaro feels like a Swiss Army knife in comparison.

And with all the options you'll almost never have to rely on snaps.

I couldn’t get Manjaro to install successfully. First operating system I’ve tried to use that just didn’t work. Their easy install thing is a bit too easy, in that it can’t even tell you what went wrong. Also docs were very weak.

I like what they are trying to do but it just did not work for me.

Arch is hard to figure out too with the wiki based docs but at least that’s advertised as unfriendly.

Yeah I've used it for a while with no issues. on my "living on the edge" machine. I still stick with ubuntu for my daily drivers. I don't understand the rant though. I understand why they moved chromium to snap.

Fedora is also a solid OS that allows you to easily stay near the bleeding edge.

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