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)
Just Arch users being delusional. Every recent thread that had Arch mentioned in the comments has some variation of “Arch is the most stable distro” or “Stable distros have more issues than Arch”.
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.
You can get yay for an AUR package manager, but it’s generally not recommended because it means blindly trusting the build scripts for community packages that have no real oversight. You’re typically advised to check the build script for every AUR package you install.
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’ve had the exact opposite experience. I switched to Arch when proton came out, and I haven’t had a system breakage since that wasn’t directly caused by my actions.
Debian upgrades would basically fail to boot about 20% of the time before that.
Difference is, on Debian you can leave machine without updates for few months, while on arch you will have troubles if you don’t update for a week, also if you install Linux for your relative, it’s better to do debian based distro because of this update cycle since normies don’t update their machines every other day, source: I’m daily driving Linux for 9 years on all my machines and some of them lay around untouched for months, also installed mint on relatives PCs
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.
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)
If you are adding sources to Debian you are doing it wrong. Use flatpak or Distrobox although distrobox is still affected
Just Arch users being delusional. Every recent thread that had Arch mentioned in the comments has some variation of “Arch is the most stable distro” or “Stable distros have more issues than Arch”.
Old does not mean stable
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.
Stable means stable
Stable is the building horses are kept in
True, but it is also out of reach of Arch users
The floor is covered in horse shit. Sounds like Arch to me!
(I kid, I kid… I run arch btw)
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.
You can get yay for an AUR package manager, but it’s generally not recommended because it means blindly trusting the build scripts for community packages that have no real oversight. You’re typically advised to check the build script for every AUR package you install.
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 have never had anything break on Debian. It has been running for years on attended upgrades
I’ve had the exact opposite experience. I switched to Arch when proton came out, and I haven’t had a system breakage since that wasn’t directly caused by my actions.
Debian upgrades would basically fail to boot about 20% of the time before that.
Difference is, on Debian you can leave machine without updates for few months, while on arch you will have troubles if you don’t update for a week, also if you install Linux for your relative, it’s better to do debian based distro because of this update cycle since normies don’t update their machines every other day, source: I’m daily driving Linux for 9 years on all my machines and some of them lay around untouched for months, also installed mint on relatives PCs
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.
I once updated an Arch that was 2y out of date, and it went perfectly fine.
But didn’t it take a while? Not that it wouldn’t take a while on Debian but Debian doesn’t push so many updates
Not really. It’d just skip all the incremental updates and go straight to latest.