this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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Debian stable. I don't understand why people would want an unstable system.
I get wanting the latest applications, and by that I mean end-user tools one uses frequently, e.g. Blender or Steam, but for anything that those rely on, very very rarely does one genuinely need anything "new" urgently. I'd argue pretty much never but I'd be curious to discover counter examples. Just fa couple of days ago https://lemmy.ml/post/24882836/16154377 arguing about the topic too. Even for drivers for gaming, which are supposedly changing relatively "fast" there is rarely an actual need for it. Quite often it's a desire to get the latest but the actual impact is not that significant.
TL;DR: IMHO stable system with security updates running few bleeding edge apps isolated is the best compromise.
Sometimes people don't want to wait 2 years to get the improvements, new features or fixes for the packages they use daily.
I tried running mint on a new laptop I bought.
Because the hardware was newer I ran into issue after issue trying to get various drivers and basic things functioning.
Moved to Endeavor, smooth as ice, everything just worked.
So at least from my experience hardware age seems to matter too.
That I understand, and I'm also on that boat. That's what I tried to express separating the system, i.e. parts with dependencies, vs "just" applications and giving an example like Blender.
I understand for that aspect but for anything that is lower down the stack IMHO what are actual features needed and people can't wait on are very very few and the trade off is probably for most people not worth it.
Obviously not everybody has the same taste for risk and some people might find it thrilling to install a system back at a random moment if it brings them 1 FPS extra or a very obscure feature that nobody else needs so I find it great that alternative exist. What I'm arguing for though is that people who do take a higher risk do so knowingly.
Edit: as an example of bleeding edge, there are some applications I download from the repository, build and run so they are basically as new as they can be. Again this is extremely precious to me, but it's not part of the "system", they are "leafs" on the dependency tree thus never leading to any catastrophic effect.
I’m on fedora 41 and gaming is almost perfect on it, the final hurdles are some VRR refinements and HDR. These are supposedly coming in f42 so I’d rather not wait god knows how long on Debian for these features to show up. However once the features arrive and I run into issues with F42, I’ll consider Deb.
I'm gaming pretty much daily, VR and flat, and... I don't even know what those abbreviations mean. I'm not saying these aren't important to you and other gamers but also want to suggest that a lot of "features" pushed by the industry are for other casual yet frequent gamers like me totally unimportant.
Now that you can get latest software from Flathub, there’s really nothing wrong with Debian “stable” except for more recent hardware support that requires newer kernel at the very least (recent userspace drivers will also come from Flatpak if the software like Steam is also a Flatpak). That is, if the stable repo has all you need and there’s no reason to supplement it with external packages.
There are however perfectly valid reasons for going with rolling to get recent improvements, which I for one care about. For example, now that PipeWire is pretty mature, Debian 13 will ship good version and it will serve well for the next 2-3 years, but some 2 years ago it was really important to get the latest and greatest to have good experience - and even early it was better than PulseAudio would ever be, just still improving rapidly, not ready for full freeze. Other example - KDE Plasma improved significantly from version 6.0 onwards introducing long awaited functionality like fractional scaling, HDR, but also improved stability and general polish. It will only be introduced in Debian 13, one full year after it was introduced.
Lastly, there’s nothing wrong with rolling and it isn't really “unstable”. Using Arch full time for the last 12 years, I only had like 2-3 situations when update actually broke something and it wasn’t my misconfiguration or a skill issue. Even then it could easily be avoided by using linux-lts kernel. In fact my Debian/Ubuntu installs were much less stable as there was always something missing that I needed (in era before Flatpaks or AppImages especially) relying on 3rd party apt repos, causing breakages and conflicts. I would usually upgrade Debian to testing or unstable anyway, so rolling, but one that’s actually open for breakage.