Stable Linux distro with up to date packages

Joseph_Boom@feddit.it to Linux@lemmy.ml – 111 points –

Maybe what I'm looking for is the holy grail, but what do you guys suggest as a Distro with a good balance between stability and up-to-date packages?

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openSUSE Tumbleweed. It's not stable as in unchanging but it is stable as in reliable.

+1 for Tumbleweed, it works so incredibly well. In the very rare case where an update doesn't work out for you, you can easily roll back to a previous btrfs snapshot.

Fedora is quite nice, too, but I've come to prefer rolling distros over a release based one.

Kalpa / Aeon might be interesting, too, if your use case fits an immutable distro.

This or Fedora which per release cycle aims for binary compatibility but happily updates packages if compatibility stays fine.

After many years on Ubuntu I switched to a Tumbleweed and couldn't be happier. Apparently a rolling distro can be more reliable than a traditional point-release one.

What is your definition of stability? I have used Arch for about ten years without any major breakage, but sometimes you do have to do some manual tinkering if a package stops working. So it's stable enough for me, but maybe not for others. Since it is a rolling release, packages are generally being updated quite rapidly.

I think that any modern rolling release distro would fit the bill though.

This here! I actually have had really good luck using Arch. I've been running it for only a month now and I make certain to patch/update once a week. Thus far it has not left me stranded. I think Arch is underrated as an OS.

I think Arch is underrated as an OS.

I don't think Arch is anywhere near "underrated". The "I use Arch, btw" meme didn't come out of nowhere. A lot of distros are based on Arch too. Even SteamOS (so the Steam Deck is essentially powered by Arch).

In that regard: yes, Arch is awesome. I use it, btw.

You will only notice the downside of a rolling release distribution when using it for years. Large breaking changes might unexpectedly be applied to your system, instead of at fixed points in time like with other distributions.

I feel like something like Fedora fits the bill: great, reliable, well-maintained repositories, decently updated kernels, yet never faced any major issues, and access to quite updated packages. Only issue is Red Hat caused a stir recently, though I still believe Red Hat does more good than bad in the open source community.

Red Hat is a corporation, putting dollars first. Not to mention Fedora is now starting to 'trample on user's privacy with telemetry integration.'

Some are making the case that Fedora's new telemetry integration isn't like the bad telemetry like Google and others, it is 'anonymised.' Every corporation says this before they remove the username from the data collected and keep the unique user id. I don't trust Red Hat..and now with this latest reveal, Fedora either. And privacy is all about trust.

Some are making the case that Fedora’s new telemetry integration isn’t like the bad telemetry like Google and others, it is ‘anonymised.’ Every corporation says this before they remove the username from the data collected and keep the unique user id. I don’t trust Red Hat…and now with this latest reveal, Fedora either. And privacy is all about trust.

Please stop with the FUD about the Fedora telemetry. It is opt-in and is no different than popularity-contest on Debian.

@NoRecognition84 @rodneyck its bad anyway. Why a opensource project will do something like that? Telemetry causes bad performance in production. If its opt in, no one will activate, and soon the business will force its use.

You are basing those assumptions on what? Popularity-contest on Debian does not cause any issues.

While I admit that the timing with Red Hat's closed-sourcing is really bad, and I'm also going to start avoiding Fedora for the same reason, saying that opt-in telemetry (that one can literally read the source code of) is "putting dollars first" is really dumb. Do you think the same about Debian's popularity-contest, which has existed since 2004?

I disagree that as the as the article states telemetry "contradicts open-source values", nowhere is it said in the official definition that telemetry by itself is not ok and as long as it is opt-in and the handler makes clear reports on the data they gathered, I'd say it's a good opportunity to give valuable insight to the developers on the use of their software, done in this manner it doesn't trample over anyone's choices either.
Notable examples of open source projects that implement telemetry are KDE and Mozilla, it's not unheard of at all

I'm making that case. I trust Fedora and Red Hat to handle telemetry correctly, but I can verify it by looking at the source and I'll give them constructive feedback if I have concerns. May I ask which distro you are planning to use where the source is NOT contributed primarily by engineers working for a corporation that puts dollars first?

OpenSuse Tumbleweed is a great choice for a rolling-release distro that is also really stable too.

I second OpenSuse Tumbleweed, only switched back to it after 7+ years and it's been great so far, no packages broke after update so far.

NixOS would fit the bill if you're not afraid of something different. With Nix it's trivial to cherry pick from unstable channel if you still want a stable base.

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The holy grail, stable and up-to-date, it exists, it's called Debian with Flatpaks.

Install Debian. Avoid doing any changes to your package selection, try to get things from flatpaks.

This is my preferred way off doing things, but trying to glue VSCode + Android Studio + the Flutter SDK + Docker + ... together via Flatpack was an exercise in pain and sadness last time I tried it.

Getting all my normal boring desktop apps via Flatpack is awesome, but for a developer it just doesn't seem practical right now

If you're a developer and want a stable distro you'll need a way to have up to date dev environments. I would use Nix or containers.

Problem with debian is it's stable in the sense of unchanging, not necessarily a lack of bugs.

He's saying he wants up to date packages and stability, which seems to mean he was current software without bugs. That's not debian stable.

I'll bite, what is this mythical bugless system thee speak of?

None, but bugs stick around way longer in debian stable because of how old the software is.

Did you... really think I was talking about a bugless distro?

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Debian testing (more up to date than ubuntu, rolling release, much more stable than the name suggests, truly free as in freedom)

This really depends on your definition of "stability".

The technical definition is "software packages don't change very often". This is what makes Debian a "stable" distro, and Arch an "unstable" one.

The more colloquial definition of "stability" is "doesn't break very often", which is what people usually mean when they ask for "stable" distributions. The main problem with recommending a distro like this, is that it's going to depend on you as a user, and also on your hardware.

I, personally, have used Arch for about 5 years now, and it's only ever broken because I've done something stupid. I stopped doing stupid things, and Arch hasn't broken since. However, I've also spoken to a few people who have had Arch break on them, but 9 times out of 10, they point to the Nvidia driver as the culprit, so it seems you'll have a better time if you have an AMD GPU, for example.

Fedora. Switched after years of Ubuntu and never looked back.

Just like the holy grail, a stable and up-to-date distro doesn't exist. Stability and recency of software typically constitute a tradeoff. Human software developers produce some number of bugs per line of code. Unless all changes made to a piece of software are bug fixes, new changes mean new bugs, almost invariably. Therefore the only way to stop the increase of bugs in a piece of software is to stop the changes to it or only do changes that address bugs. In the context of distros, a stable one is a distro where the number of bugs stays constant or decreases over time. This is how Debian, Ubuntu and every other distro that locks its software versions for a certain release work. After a release is out, only bug fix changes are permitted, with some special exceptions. The idea that there are multiple types of stability is a bit of a false narrative. Adding features, adds lines of code, which increases the number of defects. This is a fundamental fact of software engineering that's actively managed during the development cycle of most software. A collection of software like a rolling Linux distro that receives a constant stream of new features may feel bug-free to specific users, however that is typically a coincidence. Just because those X number of people didn't hit any significant defects during their usage, doesn't mean that you won't. This is true for every distro, however stable distros generally have an ever-decreasing number of bugs over their lifespan. In addition, bugs that are never fixed can be documented, workarounded and the workarounds will keep working for the lifespan of the release because there are no changes.

With all of that out of the way I hope it's clearer why there's a tradeoff between stability and recency of software in distros. There are various strategies to have a bit of both and they typically revolve around letting the bits you want be recent, while keeping everything else stable. These days the easiest and most foolproof way to get new software is via Flatpak or Snap.

You could of course abandon stability and go for recency via some rolling release distro and see if you step on any significant bugs. Maybe you won't and you'll be happy with that. Many people are.

As a personal and professional Linux user that lives with and maintains a significant number of machines, I typically go for a stable base like Debian or Ubuntu LTS and update only the software I need via Flatpak, Snap and Docker. I no longer use PPAs. This provides a great balance between stability and recency. But that's just me.

Depending on your definitions of up to date and stable:

Any of the releases every 6 months distros are more stable and reasonably up to date - something like Fedora even keeps the kernel updated during those months

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is rolling release with something called “openQA” that is run on the distro before releasing the snapshot to help stability. It also uses BTRFS with something called “snapper” by default, so if something breaks, you can pick the previous version from the bootloader

I use to be like you. I used Arch for a long time then tried everything else that was similar like tumbleweed etc. Then I used Fedora and forgot about distrohopping entirely. I still use Arch on my pi4 though because it works nicely for use cases like that.

However I will warn you anything can and will be unstable eventually. Its the nature of software, bugs will happen. For instance recently a package called ostree was pretty much broken on all distros even Fedora which is crazy.

Thanks to everyone who commented. After all the suggestions I'm still a bit uncertain on which distro I will use, but now I have basically 2 distro in my mind: Debian and OpenSuse. I will do my researches. Thanks again to everyone, this community really rocks.

Tumbleweed. And if a weekly does break something, jusr rollback.

From my personal experience you would want either Fedora or Arch Linux that's not Manjaro (not b/c Manjaro unstable, but because it can become it if you use aur with their delayed package release).

I found Fedora to be my cup of tea for gaming though it is about 2 months behind arch in terms of packages.

Whereas Arch is relies more on the terminal to download, and update packages. EndeavorOS is a good distro to try for this, but it wasn't my cup of tea especially on my laptop.

Fwiw I use BAUH on Arch as a graphical package updater which normally works well. Paru is easy to use on the cli

Out side of a few AUR packages which worked with PACMAN on the same laptop, BAUH was a good (but not as polished) package manager. TBH my main issue with Arch (outside of the laptop issue I already stated), was how terminal heavy the OS is.

I want an OS that's easy enough to use that I can give it to my Grandparents, and not worry if they want to install new card games. I found that most problems in Arch (and debain now I think of it) are usually resolved by the terminal, and rarely is a GUI made to resolve these issues. While I had Manjaro, too many times did the package database file lock itself and never unlocked itself, so I had to fix it with the terminal. BAUH also doesn't uninstall orphaned packages and doesn't show me which packages are orphaned if I uninstalled something.

Thus far with Fedora I like that most of the Applications and Flatpaks are installed with KDE Discover/Gnome Software, while OS related packages like Vulkan Drivers, and Java SDK's are behind DNF Dragon. The only time I had to use a terminal was when I was adding third party copr repos like for VSCodium, or CDEmu. I feel this could probably be done with DNF Dragon, it's a one and done process.

With the way Redhat is acting lately I'd personally stay away from Fedora.

Arch itself is pretty stable if you know what are you doing with basic installation.

I have been using Gentoo exclusively on my desktop and ThinkPad for 7 months now and I reeeaaally like it. It's a rolling release distro but you're able to set your system to only use versions of packages marked as stable by default, then using a simple config file you can select which packages you want the newest, bleeding edge versions for. This allows you to have a customizable blend of stability and newness. With Gentoo, the package manager does have to compile your packages from source, but a lot of big packages (like Firefox or the kernel) have binary options as well, and with modern hardware most packages don't take very long to compile.

Note that mixing stable and unstable (~) isn't offically supported on encouraged. You sure will get still help on the forums still. Many people mix stable and unstable, me included. When I need to unmask a unstable package I'll limit the unmasking by providing some version limit. For example: <category/package-1.3.9999. This way next major version bump won't be automatically installed via @world update. It's not bullet-proof, but better than blindly unmasking every unstable version of a package.

I didn't think I would ever say this, but: arch isn't always the answer. True: the last time the entire system broke on me was in 2006'ish, but I can't count the times certain apps have stopped working or some python upgrade messes up things. Sure: that's the price of rolling release and AUR, and I wouldn't be without it, but it's a thing one has to learn to live with, and a thing that makes 'arch' the wrong answer to this particular question.

Mint is stable.

Yeah I've been pretty happy with Mint. It's a deb/Ubuntu base but they add some stuff plus still provide packaged versions of various desktop apps that Ubuntu has pushed to using snaps for (which I hate)

manjaro KDE

They did mention stable, which is not something Manjaro can claim in my experience. They tend to hold back packages in the name of stability but it causes problems when using the AUR sometimes.

"Manjaro is not stable because it ensures no breaking updates are pushed to users" is such a weird statement to make.

That would be a weird statement to make. But that’s not really what I said. At all.

Pretty sure all they do is.simple syncing their repos with arch Linux in a interval of 2 weeks

Fedora is more up to date than Ubuntu, and quite stable. Of course, depending on the exact packages you're looking for the answer might change.

In my servers I use debian 12, but I think a good balance (stability & up to date packages) would be linux mint in my opinion.

I find EndeavorOS (Arch) to be very reliable. I use it with KDE. Gnome can be good too for a minimalistic style that doesn’t change much.

+1 for EndeavourOS, have been using for about a year now and it’s been nothing short of great.

Does endeavour use pacman? I've got Garuda running on my son's PC and I'm not a big fan of their update script.

Yes it does, you can also leverage the AUR with yay.

What don’t you like about pacman?

No, I have no issue with pacman, it's the "garuda-update" script I don't care for. I see endeavour has eos-update which I haven't really looked at much but in Garuda if use "pacman -Syu" it will interrupt with "Garuda uses garuda-update for updates" - I know it's trivial and I don't have to use it but I don't like that. Don't interrupt my workflow to try and coerce me to use your script. Yes, it's a petty gripe but it feels very microsoft-like in the same way that Windows 11 will delay the launch of Firefox to tell you "Edge was built for Windows."

I see, no EndeavourOS does not do that, you can update your system a few different ways, you can use pacman-Syu or you can use yay.

Yay will pull from EndeavourOS mirrors and the AUR

Could always install endeavouros and or arch if you prefer more work with btrfs and snapshots. Arch is mostly stable despite the laughter erupting from this post. Even if it does fall down you have the snapshots to fallback to in order to bail you out. Arch is like riding and steering a rocket but having btrfs is like having extra lives so crashing doesn't really kill you forever. Depends on what you want.

The good news is if you try arch long enough and spend hours tinkering with cutting edge software you too can come to the point where you are exhausted and just want a machine that does what the hell you want without screwing around with it. Or you can change your avatar to some sort of anime character and bask in the superiority of not only using arch but enjoying it like some sort of digital masochist.

Void Linux. A great compromise between being up to date and being stable AF. They're not bleeding edge, but cutting edge, most definitely. For example, they only recently transfered to kernel 6.3, while Arch had it months ago... with instability issues I might add. Void maintainers would rather let these wrinckles get ironed out than implement the latest and greatest.

It is a rolling release distro, so nothing new there. Packages get regular updates, same as any other rolling release distro, except for the kernel packages which are carefully examined before being submitted in the repo. The number of precompiled packages is not huge, but the src templates are (you just have to compile them from source with xbps-src, which is a piece of cake when you already have the template file).

The good thing is that all package templates get checked for buildability (test) on GH. If the template passes all tests, it makes it in the repo, if not, it doesn't, simple as that.

If you think you would be comfortable with Arch, you'd be comfortable with Void as well 😉.

Besides those builders that run the checks made by the developers of the apps (is simple running a make check or whatever the build system the package uses, void Linux does have some problems mostly because of the small team.

One of the biggest one is basically being stuck in 1.X series of musl forever until someone steps up and creates a solution that doesn't require to rebuild all packages because of an ABI breaking change in armv6l systems at 2.X musl series .

In the end you could use any distro which desktop you like (which could be Debian stable, or something immutable) and then get your applications from the latest and greatest with Distrobox

Distrobox looks really interesting. Do you know the memory or CPU overhead for using it? I have older hardware. Will distrobox perform well on it? Thanks.

No, cpu wise there should not really be an overhead, as it just uses docker or podman to run the application in question. the only bottleneck i see could be host filesystems that are not supported by docker/podman and therefore could lead to slow file access in the container.

For what purpose though? All my servers and containers run debian. Everthing I care about publishes fresh packages for it, but on their own repos. My desktop and laptop run pop_os with a few additional repos.

Everything that needs to be bleeding edge can come from snap or flatpak these days anyway.

By definition that's impossible, stable means packages don't get updated, so their version is stable. If you meant stability outside of the Linux world, as in "doesn't break" then most rolling release would fit, personally I use Manjaro, and have used Arch and Gentoo in the past, Tumbleweed is also a good option that others have recommended.

If you like Plasma or one of the other supported desktops, I suggest trying Siduction for this.

Gentoo, obviously.

I use it since it works. But it also has up to date packages. Number of times I tried moving away from it and it is just not possible.

I use Mint on side-desktop (one with graphic card I use for gaming and deep learning) and while it is easy to use it also has old software, python is stuck on 3.7 or 3.8 so it is becoming unusable even.

Will gentoo give you some problems? Probably, but those are always solvable and you will spend less time on other stuff.

Kubuntu (Ubuntu but KDE), both great KDE UI and stable kernel. I use Kubuntu LTS.

Guix is a source based (rolling release) distro. Any package operation you do like like installing, updating, or removing, can be rolled back. So if an update ever breaks anything you can just roll-back and wait for the fix. You can even pin that specific package and continue to upgrade the rest of your system. And every state is saved in a generation, so you can go to any state your system has ever been in package/configuration wise.

Nix has all of these advantages as well.

Funtoo is a bit of both. It's not as current as Gentoo but the tradeoff is not having to rebuild the toolchain every few weeks.

VanillaOS is pretty much what you're asking for. The only real downside right now is that Orchid probably won't have KDE support out of the gate

Manjaro OS is stable and gives upto date packages seems this should meet your requirements.

Manjaro's delayed package system can actually make things less stable if you use AUR. I'd recommend EndeavourOS for that experience, it's very similar to Manjaro but in my experience hasn't broken as much