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The fact that the vast majority of these bugfixes and CVEs are minor is a testament to the continuing stability and quality of Debian and its ecosystem. I've ru

The fact that the vast majority of these bugfixes and CVEs are minor is a testament to the continuing stability and quality of Debian and its ecosystem. I've run Debian on several machines for years and have upgraded confidently without a hitch. A big thank you to the maintainers and developers for making this possible.

krutzger 9y ago
Debian is like Arch but the opposite
- rvense 9y ago
  Not enough data points to really count, but I have had a lot of bad experiences with Debian updates failing or suddenly deciding that vim conflicts with something so it has to remove half my packages... Arch, however, has always been dependable in the five-odd years I've run it full time. Including machines that don't get upgraded for many months at a time. I don't know if I'd put in on a "server" that I ran for other people, but personally I have yet to see problems arising from the rolling release model.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- stinkytaco 9y ago
  If only Debian had the documentation that Arch does. I know there's man and help, but the Debian wiki seems sparse and out of date, where the Arch wiki is incredibly thorough. Sometimes I find myself at the Arch wiki to do things in Debian, but that doesn't always work. So I generally stick to Fedora, which at least sticks close to upstream.
  - 0x0 9y ago
    Most packages have pretty good documentation about anything Debian-specific installed in /usr/share/doc/<packagename>/README.Debian[.gz] and /usr/share/doc/<packagename>/NEWS.Debian[.gz].
  - passthejoe 9y ago
    Everybody on every Linux that isn't Arch either uses the Arch Wiki already, or should.
    - thomastjeffery 9y ago
      No matter what distro I use, I end up falling back on the Arch wiki and Gentoo wiki. I find the Gentoo wiki has the clearest information about specific things, and the Arch wiki has the clearest information on how to put them together.
  - dguaraglia 9y ago
    This used to be a thing! I remember the first time I installed Debian (back in the 2.0 days, I think) and it came with the "HOWTO" packages, which were essentially precursors to the semi free-format Arch wiki. That's how I learned how to configure kernel modules, what the difference between installing Linux using UMSDOS vs. a real partition, and even how ReiserFS worked. I really feel like easy internet access has taken good documentation away from us. It's too easy to Google for something, find some crappy blog with barely enough instructions to fix the problem. We've become reactive, rather than pro-actively educating ourselves.
- Accacin 9y ago
  Old and tired meme. I've been running Arch for about three years now and I've had one very minor problem when I didn't read the notes properly.
- dmix 9y ago
  Arch is very stable when using mainline packages, which are the default packages... This is "Arch is unstable" thing is very much a myth pushed forward by people who only dabbled with Arch once or twice then had it break, then completely dismissed it as unstable. Without first learning how to use it even at an intermediate level - not even expert. I too had Arch break when I was a newbie but I learned quickly how not to and it's been incredibly stable ever since. Not worse than Debian and more so than Fedora in my experience. In retrospect my actions which had broke it originally had little to do with ArchLinux itself but a general inexperience with Linux and over-eagerness when using beta software (which you have to opt in to, it's not default with Arch). The end result is that I've come out of it a far better Linux user with skills highly applicable to Debian and other distros. It's a far easy place to learn Linux/Unix properly and become familiarized with the OS/dir structure/config than any other distro.
  - RandomBK 9y ago
    It is very much a matter of perspective. Arch is more than stable enough for personal use, but is highly unstable in the context of enterprise servers, especially compared with the likes of Debian and RHEL.
    - dmix 9y ago
      Fair enough, I was speaking from the perspective of desktop and small business use.
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    My experience as an experienced user of e.g. NixOS is that if you leave an Arch system alone for a couple of months and then try to update it, something will break horribly, because something will have changed in a non-backwards-compatible way and so I have to go and try to figure out what the new configuration should be, without good error messages. At least with NixOS, it’ll probably fail during the rebuild stage, rather than once you’ve restarted some random service or decided to reboot. I don’t really want to be doing that - I don’t have a love for system administration, I want a system which gets out of my way for me to do my work. I don’t have to be careful about opting in to beta software or anything else with NixOS. If I want to try something, I can do so, and roll right back if it doesn’t work out. The destructive nature of Arch package installs and updates is its biggest flaw.
digi_owl 9y ago
And then they get yelled at by upstream for not including the latest and "greatest"...
- scrollaway 9y ago
  Yeah, well, rightfully so. I used to love Debian and I've grown more and more disillusioned by it. Their main problem is two fold: 1) They mess with the packages they distribute. Like, a lot, rather than trust upstream. And 2) they don't update things that seriously need to get updated. Example 1: Using System Python on Debian is a notoriously terrible experience for example, because they split up the venv module from Python itself and distribute it separately. I've had so many issues because of that and there's no good reason to do it. It's part of the stdlib, it doesn't need a separate package. Example 2: Debian Jessie shipped with the ancient pip 1.5.6 (https://packages.debian.org/jessie/python-pip https://packages.debian.org/jessie/python-pip - upstream is at 9.0.1 since 2016) which never got updated, just stayed stuck there, wtf? Such old versions of pip are lacking support for a bunch of things that python packages today use on setup, so it would install things in a weird way and then packages would be broken, users wouldn't understand why. One of the many cases of not giving users access to a more recent version of a package, causing the user's experience to be severely impacted (and of course, they won't know to blame debian or the pip version in this case). Edit: Incidentally, that last bit is why I always, always do `pip install --upgrade pip wheel setuptools` whenever I create a new virtual environment to make sure I don't get issues installing packages.
  - vbernat 9y ago
    I don't know the story behind the separate venv package (and can't imagine why this is a separate package). pip relies on bundled libraries and tries hard to fight any unbundling (by using slightly patched versions of the dependencies if I remember correctly). This makes it difficult to package. You can see as an additional proof of Debian messing with packages while on the Debian side, this is just the application of a distro-wide policy. If every piece of software should get an exception to the rule, we don't have a distribution anymore.
nicolaslem 9y ago
I trust so much its stability that on the Debian servers I maintain I turn on unattended upgraded with automatic reboot. The maintainers never seem to push anything not security related, most of the changes being backports of fixes from upstream. Obliviously the price of stability is that the system runs slightly old software versions, but together with containers this is not a problem anymore. Stable OS running cutting edge containers is a combo that works well for me.
- user5994461 9y ago
  >>> The maintainers never seem to push anything not security related... The policy for debian stable is to only push security fixes. The corollary is that they don't push new version for bug fixes or features.

krutzger 9y ago

Debian is like Arch but the opposite

rvense 9y ago
Not enough data points to really count, but I have had a lot of bad experiences with Debian updates failing or suddenly deciding that vim conflicts with something so it has to remove half my packages... Arch, however, has always been dependable in the five-odd years I've run it full time. Including machines that don't get upgraded for many months at a time. I don't know if I'd put in on a "server" that I ran for other people, but personally I have yet to see problems arising from the rolling release model.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
stinkytaco 9y ago
If only Debian had the documentation that Arch does. I know there's man and help, but the Debian wiki seems sparse and out of date, where the Arch wiki is incredibly thorough. Sometimes I find myself at the Arch wiki to do things in Debian, but that doesn't always work. So I generally stick to Fedora, which at least sticks close to upstream.
- 0x0 9y ago
  Most packages have pretty good documentation about anything Debian-specific installed in /usr/share/doc/<packagename>/README.Debian[.gz] and /usr/share/doc/<packagename>/NEWS.Debian[.gz].
- passthejoe 9y ago
  Everybody on every Linux that isn't Arch either uses the Arch Wiki already, or should.
  - thomastjeffery 9y ago
    No matter what distro I use, I end up falling back on the Arch wiki and Gentoo wiki. I find the Gentoo wiki has the clearest information about specific things, and the Arch wiki has the clearest information on how to put them together.
- dguaraglia 9y ago
  This used to be a thing! I remember the first time I installed Debian (back in the 2.0 days, I think) and it came with the "HOWTO" packages, which were essentially precursors to the semi free-format Arch wiki. That's how I learned how to configure kernel modules, what the difference between installing Linux using UMSDOS vs. a real partition, and even how ReiserFS worked. I really feel like easy internet access has taken good documentation away from us. It's too easy to Google for something, find some crappy blog with barely enough instructions to fix the problem. We've become reactive, rather than pro-actively educating ourselves.
Accacin 9y ago
Old and tired meme. I've been running Arch for about three years now and I've had one very minor problem when I didn't read the notes properly.
dmix 9y ago
Arch is very stable when using mainline packages, which are the default packages... This is "Arch is unstable" thing is very much a myth pushed forward by people who only dabbled with Arch once or twice then had it break, then completely dismissed it as unstable. Without first learning how to use it even at an intermediate level - not even expert. I too had Arch break when I was a newbie but I learned quickly how not to and it's been incredibly stable ever since. Not worse than Debian and more so than Fedora in my experience. In retrospect my actions which had broke it originally had little to do with ArchLinux itself but a general inexperience with Linux and over-eagerness when using beta software (which you have to opt in to, it's not default with Arch). The end result is that I've come out of it a far better Linux user with skills highly applicable to Debian and other distros. It's a far easy place to learn Linux/Unix properly and become familiarized with the OS/dir structure/config than any other distro.
- RandomBK 9y ago
  It is very much a matter of perspective. Arch is more than stable enough for personal use, but is highly unstable in the context of enterprise servers, especially compared with the likes of Debian and RHEL.
  - dmix 9y ago
    Fair enough, I was speaking from the perspective of desktop and small business use.
- vertex-four 9y ago
  My experience as an experienced user of e.g. NixOS is that if you leave an Arch system alone for a couple of months and then try to update it, something will break horribly, because something will have changed in a non-backwards-compatible way and so I have to go and try to figure out what the new configuration should be, without good error messages. At least with NixOS, it’ll probably fail during the rebuild stage, rather than once you’ve restarted some random service or decided to reboot. I don’t really want to be doing that - I don’t have a love for system administration, I want a system which gets out of my way for me to do my work. I don’t have to be careful about opting in to beta software or anything else with NixOS. If I want to try something, I can do so, and roll right back if it doesn’t work out. The destructive nature of Arch package installs and updates is its biggest flaw.

digi_owl 9y ago

And then they get yelled at by upstream for not including the latest and "greatest"...

scrollaway 9y ago
Yeah, well, rightfully so. I used to love Debian and I've grown more and more disillusioned by it. Their main problem is two fold: 1) They mess with the packages they distribute. Like, a lot, rather than trust upstream. And 2) they don't update things that seriously need to get updated. Example 1: Using System Python on Debian is a notoriously terrible experience for example, because they split up the venv module from Python itself and distribute it separately. I've had so many issues because of that and there's no good reason to do it. It's part of the stdlib, it doesn't need a separate package. Example 2: Debian Jessie shipped with the ancient pip 1.5.6 (https://packages.debian.org/jessie/python-pip https://packages.debian.org/jessie/python-pip - upstream is at 9.0.1 since 2016) which never got updated, just stayed stuck there, wtf? Such old versions of pip are lacking support for a bunch of things that python packages today use on setup, so it would install things in a weird way and then packages would be broken, users wouldn't understand why. One of the many cases of not giving users access to a more recent version of a package, causing the user's experience to be severely impacted (and of course, they won't know to blame debian or the pip version in this case). Edit: Incidentally, that last bit is why I always, always do `pip install --upgrade pip wheel setuptools` whenever I create a new virtual environment to make sure I don't get issues installing packages.
- vbernat 9y ago
  I don't know the story behind the separate venv package (and can't imagine why this is a separate package). pip relies on bundled libraries and tries hard to fight any unbundling (by using slightly patched versions of the dependencies if I remember correctly). This makes it difficult to package. You can see as an additional proof of Debian messing with packages while on the Debian side, this is just the application of a distro-wide policy. If every piece of software should get an exception to the rule, we don't have a distribution anymore.

nicolaslem 9y ago

I trust so much its stability that on the Debian servers I maintain I turn on unattended upgraded with automatic reboot. The maintainers never seem to push anything not security related, most of the changes being backports of fixes from upstream. Obliviously the price of stability is that the system runs slightly old software versions, but together with containers this is not a problem anymore. Stable OS running cutting edge containers is a combo that works well for me.

user5994461 9y ago
>>> The maintainers never seem to push anything not security related... The policy for debian stable is to only push security fixes. The corollary is that they don't push new version for bug fixes or features.