most stable
How the hell is arch more stable than Debian?
i think it’s a matter of perspective. if i’m deploying some containers or servers on a system that has well defined dependencies then i think Debian wins in a stability argument.
for me, i’m installing a bunch of experimental or bleeding edge stuff that is hard to manage in even a non LTS Debian system. i don’t need my CUDA drivers to be battle tested, and i don’t want to add a bunch of sketchy links to APT because i want to install a nightly version of neovim with my package manager. Arch makes that stuff simple, reliable, and stable, at least in comparison.
“Stable” doesn’t mean “doesn’t crash”, it means “low frequency of changes”. Debian only makes changing updates every few years, and you can wait a few more years before even taking those changes without losing security support while Arch makes changing updates pretty much every time a package you have installed does.
In no way is Arch more stable than Debian (other than maybe Debian Unstable/Sid, but even then it’s likely a bit of a wash)
It literally does though. Stable doesn’t mean bug free. It means unchanging. That’s what the term “stable distro” actually means. That the software isn’t being updated except for security patches. When people say stable distro, that is what they are trying to communicate. That means the software will be old. That’s what stable actually means.
In my experience they’re the same from a reliability standpoint. Stuff on Arch will break for no reason after an update. Stuff on Debian will break for no reason after an update. It’s just as difficult to solve reliability problems on both.
Because Debian isn’t a rolling release you will often run into issues where a bug got fixed in a future version of whatever program it is but not the one that’s available in the repository. Try using yt-dlp on any stable Debian installation and it won’t work for example.
Arch isn’t without its issues. Half of the good stuff is on the AUR, and fuck the AUR. Stuff only installs without issues half the time. Good luck installing stuff that needs like 13+ other AUR packages as dependencies because non of that shit can be installed automatically. On other distros,all that stuff can be installed automatically and easily with a single command.
I use Arch btw.
I have never had anything break on Debian. It has been running for years on attended upgrades
Stuff on Debian will break for no reason after an update
I have never had this happen on Debian servers and I’ve been using it for around 20 years. The only time I broke a Debian system was my fault - I tried to upgrade an old server from Debian 10 to 12. It’s only supported to upgrade one version at a time. Had to restore from backup and upgrade to Debian 11 first, then to 12.
I heard this so many times that I really believed arch was so brittle that my system would become unbootable if I went on vacation. Turns out updating it after 6 months went perfectly fine.
