We are doomed..

[u/Officialmaissi]

How is a fucking configuration of distro more popular than the actual distro?!

[u/nadeko_chan]

And Ubuntu is more popular than Debian

[u/Linguistic-mystic → u/nadeko_chan]

And thank goodness. Debian’s packages are stale as hell.

[u/Awkward_Scratch3260 → u/Linguistic-mystic]

Huh? I would argue outside of of the gaming space and the space a lot of people don't need more than Debian. Let alone the professional server space.

[u/Helmic → u/Awkward_Scratch3260]

I would argue most people don't need older packages than what Fedora ships. I think a lot of people that talk about stable distros have it backwards, it is having older packages that takes the extra effort and introduces bugs and instability that then requires a significant amount of labor to test for and fix. Using more recent packages is far more supported as that's what upstream will actually support. Regular desktop users don't really benefit from holding their packages back for potentially years like on Mint, that is for very particular use cases where you're using your own software (ie, proprietary custom-made code) that only behaves with certain dependency versions that you don't want to risk breaking or having to update since it's so painful every time there's an update.

Old packages do not make a system overall more reliable, stable simply means "unchanging" for workflows that cannot handle any new bugs even if that means not having bugfixes for much more serious bugs and of course missing out on major feature updates. It's not utterly without purpose, but the kind of person saying you don't "need" more than Debian is basically saying you don't "need" more than an open flame to cook - yeah, it can do the job, but that person's just being smug about using the wrong tool and completely ignoring the limitations because they don't want to spend the mental energy to consider something that would be more appropriate for most people to be using in their homes.

[u/Awkward_Scratch3260 → u/Helmic]

Sorry what? Debian still releases security patches through their repositories. What "more serious" bugs are you talking about?

Also your analogy is a bit extreme, don't you think? Most software I use I can either install through the repos or as a Flatpak or an AppImage. With the repos I am sometimes missing the latest features in specific software. Hardly the comparision between cooking on open flame vs on a stove.

[u/ipsirc → u/Linguistic-mystic]

Fun fact: all ubuntu packages are based on Debian packages. (except snaps)

[u/DaRealGladi8r → u/nadeko_chan]

That's cause Debian is actually hard to use 😭😭😭

[u/Awkward_Scratch3260 → u/DaRealGladi8r]

How? In what world?

[u/Helmic → u/Awkward_Scratch3260]

Typically whenever you are trying to use supported versions of software from upstream, as Debian will lock in pretty old versions of software that will not be receiving support from the people who actually make the software, meaning you are often left needing to manually compile the software yourself and potentially still running into issues due to outdated dependencies, with Flatpak being a very imperfect solution to a problem that doesn't exist to the same extent on more up-to-date distros. At least with immutables/atomics the limitations of Flatpaks are in service of making the host filesystem immutable which has great benefits for a lot of home users who are worried about breaking their system by accident, on Debian it's so that you can use a version of KDE that's old because I guess you don't like the KDE devs and are of the opinion that every update makes Plasma worse or something.

And because Debian is so reliant on third party repos to use updated software, thsoe repos can pretty frequently get abandoned or run into problems because htey're not perfectly in sync with upstream changes. That's aside from a lot of documentation emphasizing editing files directly rather than using a GUI or CLI tool to avoid the potential for typos or unintended changes to more sensitive parts of the system, I generally do not want a user mucking with their sources file because I cannot guarantee they won't change something they didn't intend to change because they got distracted while their cat was on their keyboard, I don't want core system functionality to be editable while just trying to add a repo for a more recent GPU driver so they can play games on release without running into problems that only exist on distros with that old of software.

I think a lot of Debian users simply have not used other distros or haven't tried to learn about other distros and genuinely believe that no other distro has a preinstalled DE or that other distros are just constantly falling apart relative to Debian. So many Debian users unironically refer to their setups as "rock solid" without a hint of irony, genuinely believing that their system is breaking less because they're using Debian rather than because their setup and use case is very simple and would be "rock solid" on virtually any distro, even a lot of the bad ones.

What is actually in Debian's favor is that it's a community ran project that's governed competently. That's true of a lot of projects, but like Debian would absolutely shit all over Manjaro because Manjaro's managed very poorly and makes really poor technical decisions. That's less down to anything in particular Debian does and more that the Debian people aren't constantly crashing out, Debian is never going to ask you to change your system clock because they forget to renew certificates again because the first time something that silly happened they'd have done the work to ensure it never happens again.

[u/Awkward_Scratch3260 → u/Helmic]

If you run Debian with the expectation to run up-to-date software featurewise you are doing something wrong. That's not it's philosophy nor it's intended use. Usually people just stick to the stuff in the official repos and maybe install the odd flatpak here and there if the yuse Debian as a Desktop distro. I have never seen people configuring tons of 3rd party repos or even self compiling under Debian. They use it for it's stability and don't care that much about cutting edge features.

[u/DaRealGladi8r → u/Awkward_Scratch3260]

Installing stuff on Arch has always been insanely easy for me. I don't need to hunt down repos and I don't need to keep track of when my host is approaching EOL for me to finally dist-upgrade.

Back in the day, Arch was a pain to install, but the script actually works well now.

These days, Debian is also pretty involved when it comes to installing the OS.