As a someone who has used both Arch, and Debian, neither has less or more bugs.

Debian has the same bugs, over the period of their stable release, and Arch has changing bugs (like a new set every update lol).

Yes, Arch is going to get a lot more features. But it comes at the cost of “instability”. Which is not so much a lack of reliability but instead, how much the software changes. I remember a firefox bug that caused a crash when I attempt to drag bookmarks in my bookmarks bar around, which lasted for like a week — then it went away.

The idea behind projects like Debian, is that for an entity that needs stability, you can simply work around the bugs, since you always know what and where they are. (Well, the actual intent is that entities write patches and submit them to Debian to fix the bugs but no one does that).

Another thing: Debian Stable has more up to date packages than Ubuntu 20.04, and Ubuntu 22.04. This happens because Ubuntu “freezes” a Sid version, and those packages don’t get major updates for a while. So often, the latest Debian stable has newer packages than the older Ubuntu releases.

the more software you install, that is not in the standard repo, the more unstable it will become…

i use a rolling release distro on my desktop, void btw.
on servers i use debian, because i want the software as reliable as possible. i don’t care if the packages are older as long as no update breaks the system…

If you want the bleeding edge go Sid.

Yeah it’s pretty out of date. You might then “eh that doesn’t matter, I like things to be stable and I’ll just imagine I’m three years in the past”.

That works until some software introduces a bug fix or a new feature that you really need and you can’t use it because of your distro’s weird update policies.

You will very quickly find that you don’t care anywhere near as much about theoretical stability as you do about a concrete feature or bugfix that is available but inaccessible.

I say theoretical because in practice Debian stable isn’t really much more stable than more up-to-date distros. It just has fewer new bugs and more old bugs.

They might try to claim they backport fixes for the old bugs, but in reality they don’t have the manpower to do that for 100k packages or whatever it is. They do it for critical bugs of very important packages but that’s it.

Depends on what you do.

If you’re just browsing, and doing casual stuff, it’s not really noticeable. It’s perfect for the less technically oriented because nothing changes for years.

I’ve been using MX for about a year now, but I definitely wouldn’t have without flatpak and nix. I need packages that aren’t years out of date, so they’re all installed through nix home-manager.

The benefit of this combo is that while user packages might break, the system itself will be predictable for the next few years. That means no new bugs, but also that minor issues won’t be solved.

I’ve used Debian stable daily for 20 years.

When I was young and passionate about Linux there were lots of things that were behind and noticible. Notably big things like KDE with obvious graphical features that I could see I was missing out on.

After a few years I stop finding any excitement in upgrading at all. I became critical of pointless features and rewrites. KDE is worse if anything.

In the last 5 years there has been stuff I’ve wanted that’s existed outside the project. Docker when it came out, Wireguard. I just ended up waiting.

The only software I run outside the repositories atm is neovim and that’s because I want to use the latest Scala-metals IDE tool. That itself is becoming more stable though.

Years ago I tried running Debian on my desktop computer and it became very quickly apparent it was not suited to my needs because of the out-of-date software. These days I only really consider rolling release distros for my desktop, or at least something with a fairly snappy release schedule. If I went for Debian, I’d probably run sid or testing.

Now, in situations where the bleeding edge is not necessary, Debian is fantastic. I’ve run it on my laptop, Raspberry Pi server and PinePhone. On the laptop, having a solid base that doesn’t break if I don’t use it for a while was great, since I didn’t use that laptop often. I did use flatpaks for some applications that I really wanted to be more recent and it worked nicely. So yes, you can use Debian as a solid base and use Flatpaks/Appimages/other to run apps you really need the newest version of, where available of course.

i couldn’t install a minecraft server because java in the repos was too old.

Yes, there are ways to install newer versions in a way that shouldn’t cause any issues (as opposed to adding a bunch of unstable repos): Flatpak.

IMO Flatpak has made Debian a lot more usable. You get the stability of the Debian base system but can have newer apps if you want to, without unnecessarily complicating matters with PPA repositories that seemingly always fuck up.

It’s easy to backport newer software to Debian stable: https://wiki.debian.org/SimpleBackportCreation#Install_Debian_packaging_tools

I had to do this with transmission-daemon when the stable version had a nasty memory leak. I use Debian on all my secondary computers, the ones where I don’t need the newest software and don’t want to fuck with it and have it break.

My main issue with it isn’t being out of date. Although that is also an issue.

The main issue is just overall lack of packages in the repos compared to arch.