For the last month, this war has been raging in my mind. Stay with Arch or try Fedora? I have been on various flavors of Arch Linux for the last two years. What keeps me coming back is the Wiki and the ability to troubleshoot problems with a simple search. Sure, there have been times… continue reading.
@shybry747 Awesome post! I’ve featured this on the main blog. And awarded this post the Master of Unix badge. It’s a great contribution for us all as we have all been in the limbo stage of distro hopping.
So much so that within your article, I added links to the following similar articles from @tmick and myself:
…see we have all been here, or will be. I also say there’s no wrong decision, but the process is to be savored. Thanks for sharing your thought process and approach to making this decision.
Regarding .rpm or .deb, if you stick to official repos, Flatpak, the AUR (for Arch users), or properly maintained third-party repos like Remi for Fedora/CentOS or OBS for openSUSE, the failure rate is much lower.
But random .deb and .rpm downloads? Yeah, expect issues. However, we generally know which will have a higher likelihood of working. lol Just like with the AUR.
The AUR is a bit of a mixed bag, while it has a huge selection, many packages are user-submitted and can break just as much due to missing dependencies, outdated PKGBUILDs or abandoned maintainers. But that does not happen much because, again, we kind of have a general idea of which are the working/active ones to try based on dates, discussions, etc.
A +1 for Arch is that at least you can easily inspect the build script before installing.
Fedora releases a new major version every 6 months (April and October). Each release gets around 13 months of support before it reaches EOL.
Nice write up Shybry747. Since you like “rolling releases” You might want to try Debian SID, it’s as close to a “rolling release” as Debian puts out. @hydn I’m surprised my article was mentioned, but then again I was very flattered that you put it on a blog. @devdev Love the diagram
I tried Debian SID once, but it wouldn’t install on my Lenovo PC. If I remember right, it either wasn’t recognizing the drive or it just wouldn’t boot. openSuse was booting, plain Debian also worked and of course Arch, so I gave up at the time.
I would admit I have been running from Debian. Why? Little tid bits here and there. The last tid bit that kept me from Debian was in the installation instructions for i3. i3: Debian and Ubuntu repositories. Debian, Ubuntu and the word old was mentioned a couple of times, so unfortunately I scampered back to my comfort zone.
The basics I got from Regolith is that it is using gnome-flashback to provide some of the background settings that we are accustomed to. They also provide instructions to use Debian SID. So I can follow @tmick advice, and try it with Regolith. That will be the plan for now. Cheers!
I also say there’s no wrong decision, but the process is to be savored. Thanks for sharing your thought process and approach to making this decision.
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