DefederateLemmyMl

“Stable” distros often had a long and risky process of upgrading to the next major release.

But you only do that once every 3-4 years, and you have months to carefully plan ahead.

Meanwhile, pacman -Syu could just provide you a major breaking multi-package upgrade of, say, your desktop environment on any random Tuesday. And then your only options are to either roll the dice and accept that update right then, and deal with all the breaking changes it may introduce, or not receive any updates at all, including security fixes, until you do.

I use Arch myself, and it’s been pretty troublefree the past 2 years or so, but it was pretty rough around the Plasma 6 release, and there have been other rough periods as well, like when there were bluetooth/wifi and amdgpu regressions in the kernel.

Just stick these commands in a cron.weekly job or something, so you can forget about it:

paccache -rk2  # Remove packages from the cache, but keep the latest 2 versions
paccache -ruk0 # Remove packages from cache that are no longer installed

I want newer software and I’m just not into going to the work needed to get the things I want running and still being easy to maintain

I don’t really get the “newer software” argument … they just leapfrog each other every year or so, if you stick to LTS versions. For example, when Trixie came out it was more up-to-date than Noble Numbat (24.04 LTS), and then Resolute Racoon (26.04 LTS) leapfrogged Trixie again, and next year Forky will leapfrog Resolute Racoon.

Also, with Debian, if the stable release is getting a bit stale, you always have the option to start off with Debian Testing, and get something that’s near bleeding edge up-to-date, and then follow testing until the next stable release and then stay on stable.

Ubuntu Server with CasaOS was fast and easy to setup. Maybe 15 minutes to get he basic file server I want

Never used CasaOS, but how would the setup process be any different on Debian? From an admin perspective, they’re nearly identical …

I had a quick glance at the CasaOS getting started page, and not only does Debian have official support but it’s recommended over Ubuntu, and the installation instructions appear to be exactly the same.

To me it just sounds like you’re a little bit stuck in your ways.

There were still plenty of annoying parts left when I ditched Ubuntu Server as my default server OS for plain Debian. In fact, increasing annoyances was one of the reason I made the switch. This was around 2018 or so, during the 16.04 LTS to 18.04 LTS switch, and I haven’t looked back. I’m quite happy with Debian 13 that’s currently powering my VMs.

Fair game not wanting to change a running setup of course, but do yourself a favor and look into Debian the next time you’re doing a new install of something.

Debian is just Ubuntu without all the annoying parts.

Both.

Debian for anything that has to run unattended for a long time without requiring much care. Arch for the desktop.

• Favorite distro: Debian
• Also favorite distro: Arch
• First distro: Red Hat Linux 5.1 (not RHEL!).
• Honorable mention: Slackware for most of the 00s

Everybody gangsta until “A stop job is running for …”