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while it has a huge selection, many packages are user-submitted and can break just as much due to missing dependencies, outdated PKGBUILDs or abandoned maintainers.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!
First things first: my “primary” Linux systems are based on Debian. Right now I have two antiX “spins”, MX Linux, Cachy OS, Endeavour OS, and Slackware.
Of these, three of the six are Debian based. On a second system I have ALL Debian-based distributions, most of which are various antiX respins. On a third system I have siduction, antiX, MX Linux, and probably Endeavour OS; on another spare old system I have antiX.
For Flash Drives I have numerous different distributions. I’d estimate at least 70-75% of them are Debian-based, and well spread out for the remaining 25%.
On Debian Sid, while I don’t use it as often as I once did, I’ve had one continually updating Sid setup in the past for at least 3-5 years, possibly longer, and I’ve had many of them run for a few years before either reimaging them, performing destructive testing with them, or just getting bored with the setup, so I rebuilt them to focus on a different setup or a different partition on that particular system.
Regarding Red Hat, professionally I used it as often as I could find a Linux-based job. My first distro was Slackware in 1995; shortly thereafter I used Caldera OpenLinux, Red Hat, and Mandrake. Shortly after 2000 I started a mega distro test initiative for years; I did some comparison tests between Red Hat, Libranet, Mandrake and SUSE Linux. In those days I found Mandrake one of the easiest to use but Libranet was my every day favorite until it ceased development; it was Debian based and I bound it to Sid repos.
My final choice was to move to Fedora. I know have Fedora Sway on my home computer and my work laptop. And I have Fedora Budgie on my spare computer. As soon as I get a chance I will write up the key points that led to this decision.
I have been on Fedora for about three weeks now, and I am enjoying Sway. I started on 41 and just completed the upgrade to 42. It wasn’t an Arch upgrade but I can live with doing that every six months.
Please report back on your continued experience. I’ve been running Debian-based (LinuxMint) for a few years. It’s worked fine and continues to be stable and reliable. But I’ve lately installed EndeavorOS (multi-boot on same system) because I was interested in Arch and KDE and think I might make it my daily driver. So far, I like what I see: smooth install, nice operation. But then I read about the Fedora 42 KDE edition (no longer a spin) and now thinking… Why am I considering different? Well, because I can. But, also, like the rest of us, I’m always interested in getting the most and best out of my system – and the measurement of that “best” and “most” can vary over time.
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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But, also, like the rest of us, I’m always interested in getting the most and best out of my system – and the measurement of that “best” and “most” can vary over time.