Maybe what I’m looking for is the holy grail, but what do you guys suggest as a Distro with a good balance between stability and up-to-date packages?

    • +1 for Tumbleweed, it works so incredibly well. In the very rare case where an update doesn’t work out for you, you can easily roll back to a previous btrfs snapshot.

      Fedora is quite nice, too, but I’ve come to prefer rolling distros over a release based one.

      Kalpa / Aeon might be interesting, too, if your use case fits an immutable distro.

  • What is your definition of stability? I have used Arch for about ten years without any major breakage, but sometimes you do have to do some manual tinkering if a package stops working. So it’s stable enough for me, but maybe not for others. Since it is a rolling release, packages are generally being updated quite rapidly.

    I think that any modern rolling release distro would fit the bill though.

  • NixOS would fit the bill if you’re not afraid of something different. With Nix it’s trivial to cherry pick from unstable channel if you still want a stable base.

  • Just like the holy grail, a stable and up-to-date distro doesn’t exist. Stability and recency of software typically constitute a tradeoff. Human software developers produce some number of bugs per line of code. Unless all changes made to a piece of software are bug fixes, new changes mean new bugs, almost invariably. Therefore the only way to stop the increase of bugs in a piece of software is to stop the changes to it or only do changes that address bugs. In the context of distros, a stable one is a distro where the number of bugs stays constant or decreases over time. This is how Debian, Ubuntu and every other distro that locks its software versions for a certain release work. After a release is out, only bug fix changes are permitted, with some special exceptions. The idea that there are multiple types of stability is a bit of a false narrative. Adding features, adds lines of code, which increases the number of defects. This is a fundamental fact of software engineering that’s actively managed during the development cycle of most software. A collection of software like a rolling Linux distro that receives a constant stream of new features may feel bug-free to specific users, however that is typically a coincidence. Just because those X number of people didn’t hit any significant defects during their usage, doesn’t mean that you won’t. This is true for every distro, however stable distros generally have an ever-decreasing number of bugs over their lifespan. In addition, bugs that are never fixed can be documented, workarounded and the workarounds will keep working for the lifespan of the release because there are no changes.

    With all of that out of the way I hope it’s clearer why there’s a tradeoff between stability and recency of software in distros. There are various strategies to have a bit of both and they typically revolve around letting the bits you want be recent, while keeping everything else stable. These days the easiest and most foolproof way to get new software is via Flatpak or Snap.

    You could of course abandon stability and go for recency via some rolling release distro and see if you step on any significant bugs. Maybe you won’t and you’ll be happy with that. Many people are.

    As a personal and professional Linux user that lives with and maintains a significant number of machines, I typically go for a stable base like Debian or Ubuntu LTS and update only the software I need via Flatpak, Snap and Docker. I no longer use PPAs. This provides a great balance between stability and recency. But that’s just me.

    • Yeah I’ve been pretty happy with Mint. It’s a deb/Ubuntu base but they add some stuff plus still provide packaged versions of various desktop apps that Ubuntu has pushed to using snaps for (which I hate)

  • I use to be like you. I used Arch for a long time then tried everything else that was similar like tumbleweed etc. Then I used Fedora and forgot about distrohopping entirely. I still use Arch on my pi4 though because it works nicely for use cases like that.

    However I will warn you anything can and will be unstable eventually. Its the nature of software, bugs will happen. For instance recently a package called ostree was pretty much broken on all distros even Fedora which is crazy.

  • Thanks to everyone who commented. After all the suggestions I’m still a bit uncertain on which distro I will use, but now I have basically 2 distro in my mind: Debian and OpenSuse. I will do my researches. Thanks again to everyone, this community really rocks.