I’m your regular end user. I use my computers to edit text, audio and video, watch movies, listen to music, post and bank on the internet…

my main computer uses now debian 12.5 after abandoning xubuntu.

For my backup notebook I have several candidates:

  • Simply install debian 12.5 again, the easiest choice.

  • Install linux mint, so I get ubuntu but without them throwing their subscription services down my throat. I’m unsure about other advantages, as ubuntu is debian based, maybe the more frequent program updates? Kernels are also updated more often than with debian as far as I know. Do you know of other advantages?

  • Go for FreeBSD: this might require a learning curve, because this is an OS I’ve never used. Are commands that different from debian?

other more niche linux OSs seem too much a hassle and I guess won’t be as supported as the main ones.

  • gnuhaut
    3·
    5 months ago

    I used unstable for years (don’t anymore). It broke itself in minor and major ways every couple of months. Maybe it wouldn’t boot or X wouldn’t start, or the package dependencies were broken and I couldn’t install certain packages for a couple of days. Stuff like that.

    You will have manually to fix these things from time to time, or do a workaround (like manually downgrading certain packages), or wait a week so stuff gets sorted. Most of the time it works fine though. I imagine the experience is somewhat similar to running arch.

    You do not get security fixes, but it’s not a massive problem usually, since you’ll get the newest version of most software after a couple of days (occasionally longer) after it is released.

    Anyway do not recommend unless you want to be a beta tester. I did report bugs sometimes, but almost always by the time I encountered an issue, it was already reported and a fix was already in the works.

      • jcarax@beehaw.org
        3·
        5 months ago

        Same here. I feel like Sid is there to catch problems, so devs and maintainers use it as such. Arch aims to be stable, though obviously not to the degree of Debian Stable, and so devs and maintainers aim for that. If one wants the Arch equivalent to Sid, there’s the testing repo, but there’s much less of a delta between stable and testing in Arch, so there isn’t much point unless you actually want to help test.