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?
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?
While I never saw the benefit (it is to complex) I do think it isn’t a bad choice
to be honest it’s actually not that hard depending on what you do with your PC. If you want something you can set up once and forget about NixOS is perfect, put auto-updates and the stable channel and you will be able to forget about it for months, only having to occasionally edit your config file to switch to a new release. In fact I’d argue that if they manage to get a GUI package manager, and auto-update + auto-clean setup on installation, they’d probably be one of the best noob-friendly distros out there even.
The issue is that they sometimes tend to do big changes to how things are handled, documentation is sorely lacking and if you’re a tinkerer (especially if you like ricing) you may have a harder time than regular distros. That said the convenience of having a list of all the programs you use in a single file is amazing and I hope every package manager adopts a similar declarative way of installing software.
I find it much easier to just use something more “normal”
fair enough it’s one of the reasons I switched out of NixOS but it’s not too much harder if your usecase doesn’t involve programs not in the repo or building from source tbf