this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2024
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I'll never stop hating that debian is labeled stable. I'm fully aware that they are using the definition of stable that simply means not updating constantly but the problem is that people conflate that with stability as in unbreaking. Except it's the exact opposite in my experience, I've had apt absolutely obliterate debian systems way too often. Vs pacman on arxh seems to be exceptionally good at avoiding that. Sure the updated package itself could potentially have a bug or cause a problem but I can't think of any instance where the actual process of updating itself is what eviscerated the system like with apt and dpkg.
And even in the event of an update going catastrophically wrong to the point that the system is inoperable I can simply chroot in use a statically built binary pacman and in a oneliner command reinstall ALL native packages in one go which I've never had not fix a borked system from interrupted update or needing a rollback
You are maybe conflating stability with convenience.
"Why is this stable version of my OS unstable when I update and or install new packages...."
The entire OS falling down randomly on every distribution during normal OS background operations was always an issue or worry, and old Debbie Stables was meant to help make linux feel reliable for production server use, and it has done a decent job at it.
I mean when I can take an Arch Linux installation that I forgot about on my server and is now 8 years out of date and simply manually update the key ring and then be up to date without any issue but every time I've ever tried to do many multiple major version jumps on debian it's died horrifically... I would personally call the latter less stable. Or at least less robust lol.
I genuinely think that because Arch Linux is a rolling distribution that it's update process is just somehow more thorough and less likely to explode.
The last one with debian was a buster to bookworm jump. Midway through something went horrifically wrong and dpkg just bailed out. The only problem was that it somehow during all of that removed the entirety of every binary in /bin. Leaving the system completely inoperable and I attempted to Google for a similar solution as arch. Where i could chroot in and fix it with one simple line. But so far as I was able to find there is no such option with apt/dpkg. If I wanted to attempt to recover the system it would have been an entirely manual Endeavor with a lot of pain.
I would also personally label having the tools to recover from catastrophic failure as being an important part of stability especially when people advocate for things like Debian in a server critical environment and actively discourage the use of things like Arch
If the only thing granting at the title of stability is the lack of update frequency that can simply be recreated on Arch Linux by just not updating frequentlyಠ_ಠ
No opinion on Debian but as a heavy ArchLinux user I should point out you shouldn't upgrade without reading the news as occasionally manual intervention is required. Upgrades can and will break things if you're not careful.
https://archlinux.org/news/openblas-0323-2-update-requires-manual-intervention/
https://archlinux.org/news/ansible-core-2153-1-update-may-require-manual-intervention/
https://archlinux.org/news/incoming-changes-in-jdk-jre-21-packages-may-require-manual-intervention/
While I personally agree with your sentiment, and much prefer arch to debian for my own systems, there is one way where debian can be more stable. When projects release software with bugs I usually have to deal with those on Arch, even if someone else has already submitted the bug reports upstream and they are already being worked on. There are often periods of a couple of weeks where something is broken - usually nothing big enough to be more than a minor annoyance that I can work around. Admittedly, I could just stop doing updates when everything seems to be working, to stay in a more stable state, but debian is a bit more broadly and thoroughly tested. Although the downside is that when upstream bugs do slip through into debian, they tend to stay there longer than they do on arch. That said, most of those bugs wouldn't get fixed as fast upstream if not for rolling distro users testing things and finding bugs before buggy releases get to non-rolling "stable" distros.
I honestly don't see this thorough testing. Not for a lot of apps I use anyway. It's normal tbf even with 2 year you can't thoroughly test every package for every bug, so you're stuck with very old bugs a lot more often than people think. And on top of that some packages are so old that instructions you find on their git pages or wherever are too new and don't work.
That won't work, old pacman versions can't deal with the fact that packages are now zstandard compressed. In fact, the window were you could successful do the update without a whole bunch of additional work was something like a couple of months. Certainly a whole lot less than a year.
I mean, if you want to use your system pacman sure. But you can just download the latest statically built pacman to do the large jump without issues. However i will concede that is more than JUST keyring update
Edit: another fun way to get around that issue pretty easily. Boot any up to date arch installer, mount the old ass system root to /mnt and just run
pacman -Sy
pacman --sysroot /mnt
Now just normal syu and the live environment pacman will update the old system, arch/pacman has a plethora of easy ways to get around what would otherwise be show stoppers on apt/dpkg :)
It's funny that your phone auto corrected or you typed a capital E out of habit. I imagine you talk about Endeavor OS a lot lol.
Was using voice to text, it auto capitalizes words at absolute random. However yes i do use EndeavorOS so it comes up from time to time :p
Did you go buster -> bullseye -> bookworm or just straight to bookworm? It sounds like something got screwed up with the usr merge.
Straight to bookworm. Sounds like that's not supported but that just further shows why i don't find it to be a functionally stable, or perhaps reliable is a better wording, system. But that's also just my opinion
FWIW I've got a Debian server that hosts most of my sites and primary DNS server, that's been running since Etch (4.0, 2007ish). I've upgraded it over the years, switched from a dedicated server to OpenVZ to KVM, and it's still running today on Bookworm. No major issues with upgrades.
It's definitely not something that will happen 100%. I've also had long standing debian systems that seem to not care. However I've had plenty that, for whatever reason couldn't handle multiple major version hops and just eviscerated themselves, I've not had that with arch personally. You may need to download the latest statically built pacman depending on how old it is but that and a keyring update usually has you covered
Debian only supports upgrading one major version at a time. If you're upgrading from Debian 10 to 12, you need to first do 10 to 11, then 11 to 12. Upgrading multiple versions at a time is completely untested and unsupported.
They really should have used the word "static" instead of stable. Stable definitely has connotations of functional stability, and unstable of functional instability.
depends on workload. Debian has very old packages and can be insecure but it is a set it and forget it type of thing, it is good when uptime is critical for a server. For desktops, or servers that need better security, but can tolerate a little downtime, rolling releases are good too, if you are enough to update frequently, and you should, since updates usually contain a lot of patched vulrenabilities
Average Grandaddy Stable distro hater
Good point! But I recently swapped to Debian 12 from Fedora 41. The latter needing constant updates several times a day. And despite this, it was not stable at all.
Fedora is good on laptops since it has the very newest kernel and thus includes all the latest driver fixes (which are needed for laptops like the Framework where they're actively improving things). On the other hand, it has the very newest kernel and thus includes all the latest bugs.
... and the latest security patches
Debian also has the latest security patches
To me the issue is the people calling a system stable because it is reliable, even if it updates unpredictably to changing functionality.