Lucky 13: a look at Debian trixie

I don't consider outdated packages to be a problem on any distro because I just use Nix (which doesn't interfere with other package managers) whenever I want a more recent package.

In your case I guess it makes sense since you have to run Fedora at work, but I was under the impression that the support for Incus (i.e. official packaging etc) was better on Debian.

I’ve had more trouble and time wasted with snap Firefox than I’ve had with official Mozilla repos under both Debian and Ubuntu.

You can however get all stability of a released version with newer packages if you use stable+backports. This would give you a stable system, and allow you to upgrade selected packages to newer versions. This can be tedious, so running testing is also possible.

And well, overall, you can also install other distributions that are bleeding-edge (Arch based?). That's why I like about the distro ecosystem :)

  # UMASK is the default umask value for pam_umask and is used by
  # useradd and newusers to set the mode of the new home directories.
  # 022 is the "historical" value in Debian for UMASK
  # 027, or even 077, could be considered better for privacy
  # There is no One True Answer here : each sysadmin must make up his/her
  # mind.

Yes, yes, we all run Postgres in containers, but if you don't, and you upgrade to a new Postgres major version, gladly using the Debian scripts that make it all more comfortable, while using umask 027, you will enjoy your day. Though I don't remember if those upgrade-scripts where from Debian proper or from Postgres.

Since that experience I always wondered what other tools may have such bugs lurking around.

Debian release cycles have a strong focus on stability, and for those situations where it matters, like running a production server, that is a pretty important feature. Just because your desktop never broke doesn't mean it's not "unstable", it's more of a disclaimer that if you put serious things on top of it and it breaks, that's much more on you because you chose to go against maintainer advice.

For me personally, with exception of the Enterprise Linux family (Alma, Rocky etc.), there's no Linux distribution I'd rather run on a workhorse, production, long term deployment server than Debian.

I'm running somebody's rebase tracking things. 6.13 I believe. Worked on one box, not on another. Oh well. Doubly irritating is that the sysctl only flags bbr not which version.

My reasoning is quite simple: I really don't need the latest versions of everything. Were computers useful two years ago? Yeah? OK then, then a computer is obviously useful today with software that is two years old. I'll get the new software eventually, with most of the kinks ironed out. And I've had time to read up on the changes before they just hit me in the face.

Sure, it was a bit painful with hardware support some twenty years ago or so, but I can barely remember the last time that was an issue.

For the very few select pieces of software where stable doesn't quite cut it there's backports, fasttrack and other side channels.

I don't understand why people like the rigmarole of constantly updating their systems. The only things that come down the wire are security updates.

Installer newer software can be managed. I use the following strategy:

- For Discord / Slack / <something that needs to be the newest>. I can normally use Flatpak.

- Use a third party repo. For Brave, Node and some other things. I use their repository.

- Open source stuff. For smaller stuff that is easy to compile from source e.g. vim / neo-vim I just compile from source so I have the newest versions.

- Python Apps / NPM tooling. I install them in my local user directory.

- Docker is installed in rootless mode.

I like to build things which last. I like to craft a software system and then use it for decades, moving it from machine to machine and intentionally upgrading the components at my pace.

>> You're obviously correct here.

It's neither obvious nor correct, the "stability vs. features" expected is completely subjective. I run Debian Stable on my desktop because I've almost never encountered needing newer versions of anything, and when I did I could usually jump to testing (i.e. the upcoming release) rather than unstable, and even then the next release usually wasn't that far away, so it was still very stable.

As other commenters have pointed out, you can run Debian Sid (unstable), but I'll also agree that if that is what you want long-term then maybe running something like Arch makes more sense anyway.

The only problem I had on Debian 11 desktop was related to the new openssh libraries. I could not install the latest nodes and rubies because 11 had older libraries. However there are workarounds related to providing some environment variables (from memory: some legacy_providers_*) so after a little googling I made them work on my dev machine (and on some old server from a customer of mine.) I'm installing Debian 13 in these days so no more workarounds, for a few years.

Everything else worked fine. I don't install much on this machine: no flatpacks, no appimages, no snaps (I left Ubuntu because of them.) Only debs and docker images. I install languages through their language manager, never through the OS: I could have only one version of them, which is useless. Same about databases. There are hardly two projects on the same language and db version. I could be using LibreOffice and GIMP from 20 years ago: they already had all the features I need.

It's a tricky thing to solve. One the one hand, you don't want your system to stop working due to an update but also want to keep the software you use updated, both in terms of security and functionality.

Mark Shuttleworth talked about this many years ago before snaps were introduced as a solution to this. The idea at the time was that a rolling release distro is too much of a hassle to maintain and even the 6-month cycle was getting to be too much. So he talked about having a stable core with a long release cycle and rolling releases for software that need to be frequently updated, both desktop and server software. The idea was great but the details of the execution left a bitter taste for many users.