Hello! I’m thinking about switching from my beloved fedora to a rolling release distro, because it really intrigues me, but I’m a bit scared of Arch, it’s still too soon for me to go down this rabbit hole XD
what do you think about debian testing? It’s not a “true” rolling release as long as I understand, but it “practically” behaves like one, correct? On the system informations I still see Debian 12, what will happen when Debian 13 stable will be released?

sorry if these are silly questions and thanks to all in advance!

  • @words_number@programming.dev
    6•1 year ago

    I’ve been using it for 5 years on laptop and desktop and I’ve had very few issues since then. Imo it offers the best trade-off between up to date packages (and availability of packages and repos), rolling release and stability. I don’t see any reason to switch distros anytime soon.

    More details: I’m using xfce and I’ve installed firefox from the unstable branch (via apt pinning) because I wanted it to be more bleeding edge.

    • tubbaduOP
      2•1 year ago

      thanks for the answer! I have installed it on a VM and noticed that only firefox-esr is present, which is a couple of versions behind. Why isn’t a “normal” firefox package included? and also, does installing firefox from the unstable branch causes any problems to other packages, conflicts, etc, or is it completely safe?

      • @sin_free_for_00_days@lemmy.one
        2•1 year ago

        I just run firefox nightly. It updates just about every day. Also, don’t worry about chodes talking about Debian not being up-to-date. For any purposes aside from some fringe new hardware, which you may have to wait a week or two to update, or chodes with a “latest” fetish, Debian is as up-to-date as any of the other highly touted fresh distributions. In the end it comes down to how you like to deal with package management.

        • tubbaduOP
          1•1 year ago

          thanks you very much! Would you recomment the testing or unstable branch as daily driver?

          • @sin_free_for_00_days@lemmy.one
            2•1 year ago

            I might be the wrong person to ask. I have both testing and unstable in my sources. Hasn’t caused me any memorable problems in the past decade or two.

            • tubbaduOP
              1•1 year ago

              gotcha, thanks!

      • @words_number@programming.dev
        2•1 year ago

        Yes, that’s why I installed it from unstable. The ESR version is an older version with added security patches. I’m not sure, why exactly they are doing it like that and I don’t think it’s a good idea. I’d say a browser should be as up to date as possible for both, bug fixes AND new features. But it worked flawlessly using the “unstable” firefox package. Another option would be the flatpak, but that’s not that well integrated into the system - last time I tried that, the font rendering in the browser was awkward. I use some other flatpaks though, most notably gimp and inkskape which work really well and are very up to date that way.

        • @Monologue@lemmy.zip
          2•1 year ago

          i encountered the font rendering bug as well, it seemed to be caused by x11 font packages and simply removing those with

          sudo apt remove xfonts-base xfonts-100dpi xfonts-75dpi

          solved the problem, here is a more detailed explanation