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Comment by eatonphil | Hacker News Reader

I like that Fedora is as easy to operate as Ubuntu, but that it is updated more frequently, so I've used it on my servers for years. I've used Arch and Gentoo a bit before and they felt like too much work. But now Fedora package updates feel too infrequent. I want to run the latest stuff but without the hassle of Arch/Gentoo. Maybe Debian Unstable?

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> updates feel too infrequent

Wow, really? I think I see available updates everyday if I run dnf or open GNOME Software. I just checked right now and got the 6.2.8 kernel. I guess it wasn't available on Fedora until 28 March, after being announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman on 22 March?

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is pretty solid, the installer also makes setting up root filesystem snapshots as easy as ticking a checkbox.

<insert favorite distro> + Nix has been working ok for me. I run a mix of Ubuntu and Arch and use Nix on Ubuntu to bridge the gap. Fedora Silverblue looks interesting as well, though it's not clear to me whether the update frequency is higher than normal Fedora.

Edit: I also like Alpine

Silverblue tracks Fedora releases, the only difference is that you're using ostree deployments which keeps "bit rot" at bay.

For the unaware, ostree treats your root filesystem somewhat like a git repo, and you add/remove packages with rpm-ostree or by using containers.

Just checked out Nix. I can definitely see myself using nix-shell. Do you actually use nix-build? If so, do you like it more than working with the familiar 3P tooling (i.e. docker)?

Coupling base OS updates and user programs together sucks, but nearly every Linux distro does it. Probably in part because the way Linux's GUI (and media generally, including audio) stack works makes cleanly decoupling the OS, including the GUI desktop portions, from programs, difficult. The distros that do rolling-release introduce a different problem of fiddliness and frequent risk to system stability, by making everything update faster and usually assuming you're running latest or near-latest of everything (and you're on your own if you're not).

It's the cost of so very much choice and of having 500 entities all separately defining what "the Linux desktop" means at any given time, though I'm not sure it's always appreciated just how steep the price is. For fairly a broad category of "nice things", it's literally why we can't have them (in Linux land). IMO it's the core reason we still haven't seen the "year of the Linux Desktop".

Debian sid is still slow as molasses on updates, probably slower than mainline Fedora releases. Best bet for a 'user friendly' distro with the latest pkgs is Fedora or Tumbleweed.

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