• @dezmd
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    114 hours ago

    You are maybe conflating stability with convenience.

    “Why is this stable version of my OS unstable when I update and or install new packages…”

    The entire OS falling down randomly on every distribution during normal OS background operations was always an issue or worry, and old Debbie Stables was meant to help make linux feel reliable for production server use, and it has done a decent job at it.

    • @LordKitsuna
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      2 hours ago

      I mean when I can take an Arch Linux installation that I forgot about on my server and is now 8 years out of date and simply manually update the key ring and then be up to date without any issue but every time I’ve ever tried to do many multiple major version jumps on debian it’s died horrifically… I would personally call the latter less stable. Or at least less robust lol.

      I genuinely think that because Arch Linux is a rolling distribution that it’s update process is just somehow more thorough and less likely to explode.

      The last one with debian was a buster to bookworm jump. Midway through something went horrifically wrong and dpkg just bailed out. The only problem was that it somehow during all of that removed the entirety of every binary in /bin. Leaving the system completely inoperable and I attempted to Google for a similar solution as arch. Where i could chroot in and fix it with one simple line. But so far as I was able to find there is no such option with apt/dpkg. If I wanted to attempt to recover the system it would have been an entirely manual Endeavor with a lot of pain.

      I would also personally label having the tools to recover from catastrophic failure as being an important part of stability especially when people advocate for things like Debian in a server critical environment and actively discourage the use of things like Arch

      If the only thing granting at the title of stability is the lack of update frequency that can simply be recreated on Arch Linux by just not updating frequentlyಠ_ಠ