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?
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.
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.
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.
Debian testing (more up to date than ubuntu, rolling release, much more stable than the name suggests, truly free as in freedom)
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.
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
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.
+1 for Arch
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.
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?
No, but I do see you mentioning problems without showing any solutions.
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.
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.
It gets close, but NixOS doesn’t have LTS releases yet, so you’ll still be updating at least every six months. Combining the Nix package manager with a Debian stable or Ubuntu LTS might be an option, that gives you a stable base and a few up to date packages on top. However integrating the Nix packages with Debian can get tricky when it comes to core packages such as window manager or DE.
Is this not solved by using the “unstable” nixpkgs channel or is that something different?
I’m a NixOS newbie and still learning a lot about it haha
The NixOS unstable channel allows you to get the new packages, but what OP wants is also a stable system and NixOS doesn’t really offer. NixOS has new releases every six months and only provides security updates for one month after a new release is out. So you’ll be updating pretty frequently and things do break in those updates pretty frequently.
Ubuntu LTS in contrast promises security updates for up to 10 years and they have LTS releases every 2 years. So you can basically install it once and forget about it. The downside is that Ubuntu has no way to install new software on the old system by itself, which is why a mix of Ubuntu LTS and Nix might be worth a consideration in some situations, that gives you both a stable base and bleeding edge software.
Devuan testing branch.
Nixos
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.
