They say debian is free and has its promise, but Arch has like 2-4 maintainers?
If you know vaguely what you’re doing or are willing to learn, you can go with whatever and it’ll be fine.
Personally not a big fan of debian because they tend to be slower and more conservative on updates. Arch is a bit more technical, but very customizable.
I’m personally a big fan of Fedora. Software updated quickly enough to have all the bells and whistles, slow enough to not get cut by bleeding edge software.
Gentoo is where you learn the most about Linux and software in general.
Long time gentoo advocate(/fanboy) here, and so, it stings a little to say this, but, there are ways to use gentoo that do not have you learn as much about your system as, say, e.g. CRUX, KISS/Carbs, LFS(?), starting with just a busybox and kernel, Exherbo, or even many ways of using slackware [and several other suggestions yet, but gotta cut the list short somewhere].
Gentoo’s very conveniently wrapped up with portage. So conveniently, you can be forgiven for lingering in the convenience and not venturing deeper into what the convenience wraps around. It’s not a thick opaque plastic wrap like some distros that try hard to lower the entry bar, but it is still convenient. … Conveniently availing advanced fidelity of choice over what you’re installing, conveniently managing complexity in simplicity, but ultimately a convenience trap still none the less. … Many Gentoo users look like uneducated yokels in flying saucers, compared to those who actually do compile their software themselves (they run
make), rather than those who have emerge do it for them. [Or an even more extreme example, we’re like anyone using an LLM voice assistant.] As in: We’re not superior skilled savvy sysadmin, we just have better tools.And why do the effort of learning to become better, when the machine does it for you.
But then, with gentoo, you do still have the choice. Gentoo is all about choice.
One can try say same for any distro, and that’s true, for all being (mostly) Free Software (“Opensource”) and so can study (freedom1) it to whatever depth your curiosity takes you, but, Arch does try take some of your choice away from you, not the freedom to study it, but in that it insists it have the freedom to bite you. [ Though, there be ways to mitigate that ]. Debian (or Devuan), Gentoo, Suse, and others, let you opt-in to the fast lane. Arch seem to be screaming “COME WITH US, FAST AS WE CAN!!!” and leaving little room to hear anything about taking arch to a slow lane.
It was mostly sarcastic suggestion, but as you said, you can hit the ground running with Gentoo nowadays very quickly, and go back and revisit every part of it and play around with it, and learn about everything later.
I think it’s Ubuntu that’s slow, while Debian as its base is smaller and faster?
No, Debian is typically quite a bit older than even the Ubuntu LTS. E.g. they currently still don’t ship a Nvidia driver that supports the 50 series GPUs.
Slower on updates, not slow to run. Slower on updates is referring to how it takes longer for new features / software to be shipped out for you to download. Debian usually prioritizes machines that chug along for a long time without anything breaking, rather than adding new stuff
You’re right that it’s not slow to run. It is small and fast
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Performance differences between distros tend to be negligible. Unless you have a specific use case and a distro specifically tuned for that, you will hardly notice any difference.
you will hardly notice any difference
until you leave linux, to assembly operating systems, like kolibrios.
Ubuntu is based off the testing version of Debian, so they have newer software versions
Your logic seems sound, yup.
Though broader than the issue you’re responding to, the bigger quality of note in Ubuntu, is not that it’s slow (nor larger), but instead, the most issue of ubuntu, is that they’re very very silly. More marketing silly than sensible development.
Better Ubuntu be slow than fast anyway. See what they do when they try go fast? Like replacing the userland with rust…
That’s beyond just “ready or not, here it comes” release model madness.
It’s silly.
Why have you forsaken God? You should be praying in TempleOS.
Isn’t it true that a server running TempleOS has the best protection against remote exploits?
Yes, the networking stack is perfectly protected for it only connects directly to the heavens via faith based prayer-wave.
Most based opinion i’ve seem here
larp larp larp sahur ✌️
If you have to ask, you definitely don’t want Arch
NixOS ;)
Fucking sadistic bastard…I second this.
Let me expose my lack of knowledge and experience in this.
Afaik. NixOS is completely build from configs, thus easy to VCS, and you can try stuff and then just roll back like nothing happened… what’s the difference to snapshots and why is it sadistic/masochistic but worth it?
Give me your NixOS pitch.
Snapshots work in filesystem level. NixOS rollbacks work in system configuration level. NixOS has steep learning curve due to the nix language and fragmented documentation but once you get grip of it, it works great. Either way, you netted the days of suffering to set everything up :)
The problem with a beginner using NixOS is that it teaches them, well, NixOS. Using just about any other distro will teach them transferrable skills; i.e. suffering , until they embrace ansible;)
Unless that other distro is Guix, in which case Stall man smiles upon you and I wish you the best with your ultra libre Pentium machine.
You can learn to fly.
Here, take off, for the first time, from the top of this cliff.
I moved to nixos, then moved my server to nixos. It was painful, but now I don’t have to remember where I put that systemd timer or where stuff is in general.
If you are interested in maintaining your OS as an ongoing and constant project, go with Arch. You will learn a lot about Linux, and about system administration in general. You will also have entire days where you are unable to do anything productive with your computer because the last update broke userspace again and you can either spend a lot of time troubleshooting your specific problem, or spend a lot of time reinstalling and reconfiguring your system.
If your computer is more than just a hobby platform and you need to use it regularly for any kind of productivity, go with Debian. Set it and forget it.
Either way, off-system file backups are recommended.
Unless you intentionally doing something wrong or have close to zero experience with linux there might some of the problems you’ve mentioned, also you can expect similar on debian if you are having them on arch.
Anyway, I would recommend something other to OP because both of these distributions require some non-zero experience with linux. (Also OP itself feels like trolling)
Is your hardware ten years old or more?
Do you want a system made up of software that is on average 3 years old?
Do you want absolutely ridiculous stability for the uptime memes?
Are you a fan of the idea that every design decision should be done by a committee of theoretically democratically chosen developers but is actually just whoever wants the job because there is never any real transparency or motion about when the meetings are, much less when elections are?
Does the idea of your operating system being compatible not because its good but because it’s just the largest base thanks to corporate investment make you moist?
Then pick Debian.
If you answered no to literally any of those options then go ahead and pick an Arch flavor, or Arch itself.
You mean Cachy OS? Yeah, I’ve heard of that, might choose it, I dunno yet.
Linux '26er here. I tried a few and CachyOS is now my jam. I’m way too new to offer true insight, but as a new convert, Cachy has good video/gaming support and all the core features I need to keep exploring. 100% recommend a day or two to try it out.
I run Cachyos (KDE), for 10 months now, on a 13 year old HP workstation. Daily updates. Best distro I’ve used (previously used Mint, SuSE, Debian, Ubuntu), wouldn’t go back to any of the others.
I’m also fairly new, and one big benefit of CachyOS is the sensible defaults. You get to start with the modern way of doing things instead of having to discover them slowly.
microinstead ofnanofor exampleBut is it catchy?
I’ve never used it but recommend it to newcomers because they all seem to like it.
I’m honestly not sure if I’m witnessing the most autistic responses to the most obvious shitpost ever, or if the AI bots got into Lemmy already.
Why wouldn’t we? Lemmy has at least 12 real people.
I’m a real people, and I’m livid that I shouldn’t respond with a paragraph about Mint because this is obvious shitposting.
That’s right, you are a real people! You can tell you’re real because your eyes are real eyes.emoji . This was first discovered by the early 21st century philosopher — jayden smith.
So are you, Bruce. You’re also real, and don’t need to dress up in a rubber suit for attention. You’re good enough.
Debian is chosen for Satellites because it is “stable”, that is it doesn’t do major changes like changing the Kernel.
Arch isn’t for beginners, but it’s a rolling release distro that’s nice and simple but powerful.
You do have the option though. I run LMDE7, and installed a 7.0-prempt kernel yesterday because I felt that I was seeing too much stuttering in 3d games. I installed it from my package manager which already had debian Backports turned on.
Some have started with arch.
Not all beginners are alike.
… Some even started with LFS.
Debian Unstable, if you like to live dangerously and have to reboot every couple of years.
/s
I like that even without the “/s”
I use both, debian on servers and old machines, arch on my desktop. Arch being rough is way overblown in my experience, the install script makes it straightforward to setup and it’s been pretty much painless since I switched to it two years ago, I had experience with debian before that. Both arch and debian have fantastic documentation available.
Debian and derivatives, in my experience, are really well supported so that’s a plus. Age of packages has never really bothered me and cases where I want bleeding edge there’s options for that.
Both are solid options and I don’t think you’ll be upset either way, if you can I’d try both.
Two extremes here. Debian is slow to update while arch is bleeding edge.
I avoid containerized desktop apps (snap, flatpak) so I couldn’t run Debian as a daily driver. You’d want to use the latest FireFox and their repo’s release is old. You you can get it from flatpak, but I don’t want to do that. Running on recent (<1y) hardware will also be problematic. I guess you could keep on adding 3rd party repos to your install, though some post from debian forums always stuck with me: “Debian is only what is released + whats in the official repo. Install anything else and you’re not running debian anymore.”. Its a whacky OS and I love it, but daily drive it only on my server.
Arch puts everything on their repo straight away. And if its not there, you’re downloading code from AUR and building it yourself. I actually appreciate this since it complies with the philosophy that you can’t really trust your applications unless you read the source and build it yourself. Awesome, but the general public shouldn’t be doing this… I don’t mind applications being distributed in binary form. I am able to trust linux community maintained repositories. Arch is for the geeks imo.
I found Fedora to be a good middle ground, since it gets package updates straight away while still maintaining fixed OS releases. No need for snap or flatpaks since their repo has everything and is updated. Its also widely supported by software vendors (just like debian). Id go with it as a recommendation, but still note that its philosophy is free software only and this can potentially mean tinkering with additional stuff from RPM fusion, especially if you dance with nvidia and watch videos encoded with non free codecs.
It takes a bit of time to find the right distro and that is the biggest obstacle to linux imo.
Out of curiosity, why avoid Flatpak? I get snap or AppImage, but Flatpak is generally great.
Not parent poster, but this is a detailed explanation for the big ideas.
Wow, thanks for the link! I’m a huge Flatpak fan and always thought they were awesome. I still do, but a lot of the issues in that blog were news to me. Thanks for sharing, it was a really good read!
why avoid Flatpak? I get snap or AppImage,
Objectively, they all frustrate validation the same. When comparing with a SLSA3-compliant setup where every installed artifact has a signed checksum in a signed bundle from a signed resource on a signed repository, and the endpoint to this is readily available from something like authenticated SNMP into the single source of truth, they all tends to compare poorly.
The chart below completely ignores that Debs are consolidated into a single source of truth as well, and I feel violating SSoT should cost significantly because of dependency holes when artifact registry is incomplete, but SLSA doesn’t care about that part.
Ecosystem / Format Estimated SLSA Level Update Reliability / Model Trust Chain & Provenance Comments (withheld) 3–4 Very high; repo-based, transactional updates Strong: signed packages + signed repo metadata + central DB; distros enforce reproducible builds. OCI containers (hardened pipeline: cosign + Tekton/in-toto) 3 High if using automated CI/CD and policy enforcement Strong if you use signed images + non-falsifiable provenance; this is rare but achievable. DEB (distro repos) 2 High; repo-based, APT handles dependencies Medium: repo metadata signed, but per-package signatures not mandatory; weaker checksum chain. Flatpak runtimes (Flathub) 2 High; centralized runtimes, predictable updates Medium: signed OSTree commits; build infra more centralized, but not full end-to-end provenance. Flatpak apps 1–2 High; repo-based, automatic updates Mixed: OSTree signing helps, but build provenance varies by publisher; no uniform SLSA guarantees. Snap (strict confinement) 1–2 High; centralized store, auto-updates Centralized signing by Canonical, but opaque build pipelines; trust is “trust the store operator.” OCI containers (typical public images) 0–1 Medium; pull-latest model, tag drift common Usually unsigned; mutable tags; no guaranteed provenance—trust is mostly social and reputation-based. Snap (classic confinement) 1 High; same store/auto-update model Same store trust, but classic snaps bypass sandbox; even more reliance on publisher integrity. AppImage 0–1 Low–medium; ad-hoc self-update or manual downloads Almost no chain of custody; signatures optional; no central repo or provenance expectations. npm (JavaScript) 0–1 High frequency, but low reliability of safety; semver + lockfiles Registry accounts can publish arbitrary tarballs; no default signed provenance; transitive deps explode risk. PyPI / pip (Python) 0–1 Similar to npm; pip + requirements/lockfiles Tarballs/wheels from arbitrary maintainers; no mandatory signing; provenance work (e.g., PEP 740) is emerging but not standard. Composer / Packagist (PHP) 0–1 Good tooling, but same “trust the registry” model Packages pulled from Packagist/VCS; no mandatory signatures; dependency graph trust is social, not cryptographic. CPAN (Perl) 0–1 Mature ecosystem, but manual/legacy in many flows Historically minimal provenance; mirrors and authors are trusted by convention, not by SLSA-style attestations. Other language registries (RubyGems, crates.io, etc.) 0–1 Similar to npm/PyPI; lockfiles help reproducibility Central registries, but no default SLSA provenance; integrity is mostly TLS + registry operator trust. Man, I really need to check out “(withheld)”
Seriously though, nice table!
the table reads like AI output
Can have fast Debian with ceres [1] ~ er, I mean with sid. And experimental staging area even beyond that.
Can have slower more stable (~?) arch with manjaro.
While neither are gentoo, they (/ the community) have availed at least that much choice.
[1: that’s Devuan’s]
PS, speaking of
Its a whacky OS and I love it
look at this old wacky thing I love (and have been daily driving since).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuYMBCcgs98
Gets around those quandries of having to pick which one, like between bleeding edge rolling and LTS stable, or between arch and debian, or whatever other pair of otherwise seemingly mutually exclusive criteria that otherwise seem inescapable from compromise. Nope. No quandry. Can haz both. ;)
Shshsh. ;) Linux’s best kept secret. Hehe.
Not OP, but this is a fantastic answer, and I wish I’d read it before installing Deb on my wife and friend’s computers!
I use CachyOS, but decided “bleeding edge” would be more of a nuisance than help for them, so opted for “very stable”, then immediately ran into challenges trying to get apps, and needed to get containerized apps for everything. I should have gone with something Fedora-based or just stuck with what I know, CachyOS.
I feel like there are other options here. Fedora? OpenSUSE?
Fedora is so, so nice. I have it on all my personal computers.
At my work they only tolerate Ubuntu. My God, it can be so frustrating. Snap gets in the way constantly. Somehow Ubuntu LTS seems to have a knack for precisely choosing the worst package versions for a workstation.
Fedora on the other hand just gets out of my way and lets me get shit done.
I am obligated to recommend Alamalinux at any and all opportunity
And a few more yet
This
Fedora is a middle ground between the two.
I’ve been a Debian guy for a long time for one reason, stability. I don’t game a lot, but haven’t had an issue in years, my son uses arch and games way more than I do, but he also has to fix a lot more stuff that updates seem to break.
If you are under 30 I almost want to encourage Arch as you’ll be forced to learn a bit more over time and learning is never a bad thing. If you might game some, but value a rock solid system, go Debian.
If you don’t care, go with Mint. Fast, secure, simple.
If you have some special thing like an old slow computer, uptime or specific security needs and so on, check out all the other good answers here in the post.
