It only benefits users who need a set it and forget it solution. I chose it for my server because I don’t want to touch it but I dread the day I have to upgrade the whole system and something small like the zfs filesystem, docker, or my samba setup suddenly has issues and makes it unbootable like that kernel update that bricked my Nvidia drivers a couple months ago. I’m hoping that’s a fluke because it happened at the worst time for me.

It’s four years from now, I don’t have to think about it yet.

I’ve heard the counter argument from developers that jumping from a two to four years old codebase is an absolute nightmare to deal with and moving to a rolling release means not dealing with the burden of migrating over to a newer version and implementing small patches when needed.

Entire fixes, features, and upgrades miss the deadline and have to wait because of a process like this. It’s still a moving target but on a different scale. They try to roll the newest packages possible into the release meaning the majority of the bug fixing and testing happens mere months before release.

It’s also a burden on bigger teams especially when they build their own automations and tooling. why Google devs moved to a rolling release.

It’s a solid concept but so much changes all at once it’s a big project to migrate to a newer version. It frontloads a lot of the work sometimes to the point of delaying support for the newer version. Unless you build for Debian unstable and work backwards from there (basically rolling) but doesn’t guarantee back ports don’t break the software.

The behavior doesn’t change until they brick a driver or mess up your software without any worning months after that release taking them over a week to fix it. 😆 Thanks Debian for consuming a whole afternoon just before movie night with the family started.

Your funny, I think the word your looking for is stagnant. I’ve never seen any substantial evidence of a distro with outdated packages really being any more reliable than a rolling release.

I’ve only had a Debian server for six months and have already ran into issues with botched updates multiple times on bookworm. I only use it for zfs because Debian often runs a kernel old enough to support it. I had an arch server run for nine years no issues zfs just takes a bit to support the latest lts kernel.

I’ve troubleshooted Debian just about as much as I’ve troubleshooted arch so what’s your point.

I guess what I’m getting at is stable is great. But it doesn’t run on half of my shit and things that are simple in other distros are (at least for me) unintuitive and not very well documented on the Debian wiki.

It would make it easier if it didn’t take five minutes to load every page and sometimes fail to load at all. I’m fond of doing my own research but Debian’s wiki is super slow.

I don’t care what you guys think just stop trying to convince people that the choices they make are wrong. Everyone has different use cases and different requirements.

“stable” just means deal with different issues that are often more confusing, annoying, and don’t exist anywhere ese like outdated libraries that don’t work with concurrent git projects.

Trying to get any non free software working in an intuitive manor when the internet doesn’t even work out of the box and your looking at a 4 year old version of gnome for one of your first forays outside of Ubuntu. I’m sure that recommendation works out real nice for newcomers. So fucking annoying to take advice like that and barely manage to install it just for it to be a mess of expired ssl certificates and apt to not work when you finally managed to connect it to the Internet.

I downloaded it from the website how hard can it be to make it work out of the box. Give me a raw arch install anyday. At least I know what’s even happening. Or at least give me something that works out of the box like fedora tries to do.

I’m sorry for any Debian fans I offended. It’s great for a server but you gotta know something about the weird stuff Debian does to even understand how to coexist with it. Ubuntu became popular for a reason and it’s annoying that it solves so many of Debian shortcomings but thems the breaks.

I don’t like Ubuntu but Debian alright in my book it’s a community thing and Debian users have their own language I can’t speak. Most my computers just didn’t run Debian, too new and buggy because of it.

I’m not talking about stability I’m talking about it actually working on modern hardware without receiving updates that break things or a lack of support at all. Trust me, I’ve tried on multiple devices and it was painful. I’m never gonna recommend Debian for anyone who wants to use it on a desktop period.

Also Nvidia drivers broke on Debian she couldn’t watch anything off the movie server until I rolled back the driver, a fix I’ve never had to do on my primary computer. A much newer version on my arch install and I didn’t have to worry about back ported patches bricking software.

Arch is pretty stable and often more usable than something based on Debian from my experience fedoras better but has so many more bugs compared to arch. I chose arch because everything was broken on Debian and fedora based stuff. Leave me alone with your philosophy about “out dates software is stable software”.

Not everyone uses a ten year old system and bugs in graphical software that exist when the new version of Debian drops exists for pretty much the whole releases lifecycle from my experience and that’s painful.