Linux middle ground?
so a common claim I see made is that arch is up to date than Debian but harder to maintain and easier to break. Is there a good sort of middle ground distro between the reliability of Debian and the up-to-date packages of arch?
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Fedora is pretty good there, but I wouldnt use the DNF variants.
The atomic variants though totally rock. Atomic Desktops, IoT, etc.
The atomic model deals with all the troubles you would have with so new packages.
OpenSUSE slowroll would be a better middle-ground, but I have had strange broken packages and they dont have a useful atomic model, as it is not image-based.
The downside with the Atomic variants is that ostree is much slower and takes additional storage and bandwidth. It isn't half bad if you are willing to reboot but it does add an additional layer of complexity.
I really need to try NixOS, it may be good?
It is very complicated for little value add. I would much rather use Ansible or bash scripting.
Ansible is useful in particular as it is much more repeatable and you can use Ansible pull to pull from a git repo
The thing is package management, resettability, rebasing/redeploying with a config file, and avoiding config file creep.
I broke 10 distros before, and of course I also learned, but I simply didnt break Fedora Atomic Desktops in 2 years or so.
But I layer about 20 packages, which is not a really nice process on Atomic, while it works for sure.
I use Fedora silver blue and it is mostly solid. However, it isn't something I would jump into without an interest in immutable Linux or embedded systems.
I think Silverblue is the perfect distro for random computers you never manage.
Actually uBlue silverblue as they fix the like 5 issues there are, like an intelligent and actually automatic updater, flathub, drivers etc.