Stable if you want stability, meaning it doesn’t change often (minor updates only).
Testing if you want newer packages that have at least gone through some level of testing. They’ve been in unstable for at least 3-10 days with no major bug reports.
Unstable/sid if you want to assist the Debian project by reporting bugs (which is always appreciated!), or want the “breaks all the time” experience of other distros.
Debian unstable doesn’t break all the time, tho. There’s only been a handful of times in my 27 years of using it that something got truly borked.
(That’s not counting times when two packages have the same file and there’s a conflict. That’s trivial to resolve once you’ve seen it a few times. Even that is relatively rare.)
I also use Debian and Fedora on different computers so I’m curious, how do they compare in your opinion? Any interesting differences or reasons to use one instead of the other?
I’m not the person you were replying to, but I was dual booting Debian and Fedora for around a month, and ended up sticking with Fedora.
The main benefit of Fedora is that packages are much newer than Debian (even if you run Debian unstable/sid). Some examples I hit:
KDE Plasma 6.0 was released in February this year, and Fedora got it shortly after release. Debian sid still doesn’t have it - it’s in experimental but isn’t in a fully working state yet. Debian doesn’t focus on completing large upgrades like that until it’s closer to the deadline for the next release.
Until last month, the AMD graphics firmware (and in fact, all non-free firmware) in Debian stable, testing, and unstable was a version from over a year ago (June 2023) that had a bunch of bugs and didn’t support newer GPUs properly at all. See the version numbers here: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/firmware-nonfree/news/. On laptops like the Framework 16, you hace to manually download firmware from a repo on kernel.org and place the files in the right spot. Fedora comes with the latest firmware in each release.
Fedora also has some niceties, for example it comes with Plymouth (graphical boot-up and shut-down screen) installed out-of-the-box instead of showing a bunch of scrolling text.
The Debian approach is fantastic for servers. Servers have hardware that generally doesn’t change during its lifespan, and need to be stable. A server you set up today still needs to be working the same way 2 or 3 years from now, without worrying about major breaking changes. You can install unattended-upgrades and get automatic security/bugfix updates with very little risk of anything breaking.
On the other hand, for a desktop environment, running the latest versions can have some benefits. Hardware and can change often (especially GPUs and their drivers), desktop environments fix bugs and add new features weekly, etc.
I don’t mind Debian on desktop, but IMO Fedora is better. I’ve been running Debian on servers for over 20 years though, and I’ll continue doing so.
One thing I can’t stand about Fedora is the installer. It might be because I’m more familiar with debian-installer, but I find partitioning in Fedora’s installer much more difficult. I was trying to set up a fairly standard layout on my laptop (EFI partition, /boot partition, LUKS encryption partition with LVM in it, then / and /home ext4 LVs) and I got so frustrated that I set it up in the Debian installer then rebooted into the Fedora installer lol
I’ve had a similar experience. About the old packages with bugs, I think that can work both ways. The newer packages might have bug fixes, but also new features with different bugs. Sometimes it feels like the number of bugs is constant, you just have to choose between old known bugs or new unknown bugs.
Yes, Debian packages are old. Tell me again when your arch install breaks for the 4th time this week.
and you have a choice with Debian. You can run:
Debian unstable doesn’t break all the time, tho. There’s only been a handful of times in my 27 years of using it that something got truly borked.
(That’s not counting times when two packages have the same file and there’s a conflict. That’s trivial to resolve once you’ve seen it a few times. Even that is relatively rare.)
Yeah, it was just a response to the Arch memes since I’m sure Arch doesn’t break all the time either.
I mostly use Debian and Fedora, so you’re preaching to the choir
I also use Debian and Fedora on different computers so I’m curious, how do they compare in your opinion? Any interesting differences or reasons to use one instead of the other?
I’m not the person you were replying to, but I was dual booting Debian and Fedora for around a month, and ended up sticking with Fedora.
The main benefit of Fedora is that packages are much newer than Debian (even if you run Debian unstable/sid). Some examples I hit:
KDE Plasma 6.0 was released in February this year, and Fedora got it shortly after release. Debian sid still doesn’t have it - it’s in experimental but isn’t in a fully working state yet. Debian doesn’t focus on completing large upgrades like that until it’s closer to the deadline for the next release.
Until last month, the AMD graphics firmware (and in fact, all non-free firmware) in Debian stable, testing, and unstable was a version from over a year ago (June 2023) that had a bunch of bugs and didn’t support newer GPUs properly at all. See the version numbers here: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/firmware-nonfree/news/. On laptops like the Framework 16, you hace to manually download firmware from a repo on kernel.org and place the files in the right spot. Fedora comes with the latest firmware in each release.
Fedora also has some niceties, for example it comes with Plymouth (graphical boot-up and shut-down screen) installed out-of-the-box instead of showing a bunch of scrolling text.
The Debian approach is fantastic for servers. Servers have hardware that generally doesn’t change during its lifespan, and need to be stable. A server you set up today still needs to be working the same way 2 or 3 years from now, without worrying about major breaking changes. You can install
unattended-upgradesand get automatic security/bugfix updates with very little risk of anything breaking.On the other hand, for a desktop environment, running the latest versions can have some benefits. Hardware and can change often (especially GPUs and their drivers), desktop environments fix bugs and add new features weekly, etc.
I don’t mind Debian on desktop, but IMO Fedora is better. I’ve been running Debian on servers for over 20 years though, and I’ll continue doing so.
One thing I can’t stand about Fedora is the installer. It might be because I’m more familiar with debian-installer, but I find partitioning in Fedora’s installer much more difficult. I was trying to set up a fairly standard layout on my laptop (EFI partition, /boot partition, LUKS encryption partition with LVM in it, then / and /home ext4 LVs) and I got so frustrated that I set it up in the Debian installer then rebooted into the Fedora installer lol
I’ve had a similar experience. About the old packages with bugs, I think that can work both ways. The newer packages might have bug fixes, but also new features with different bugs. Sometimes it feels like the number of bugs is constant, you just have to choose between old known bugs or new unknown bugs.