Hi all,
I’m currently a happy Fedora user, but I’m attracted to the Debian world because of the sane choices Debian has mostly always taken. It’s a phenomenal distro, with a lot of support (both internla and from 3rd parties), and that follows some of the principles I care about. It has a long support period, it’s less opinionated than other distros, has a huge ecosystem and it’s community-run. Also, it’s an excellent distro for almost all use-cases: IoT, Server and Workstation.
I love Fedora, but it’s not exactly an LTS release, so I have to jump ship to CentOS whenever I need something more stable. Not that I dislike that heavily, though, but I’d like to try the Debian world.
I am not opting for Ubuntu because the snapization of the distro, which is becoming more dependent on snaps as time passes. I like some stuff about PopOS, but some other stuff I don’t. If I were to choose vanilla Debian, which one should I pick to be the most similar to Fedora?
- Stable
- Testing
- Unstable (Sid)
I’ve read that Stable = CentOS, Testing = Fedora, Unstable = Rawhide/Arch. However, during the freeze period, neither Testing nor Unstable will actually behave like that at all. How long is that freeze period and how much of a big deal is it?
The hope for freeze is 6 months, yes… but not all of that is “hard freeze”. Some portion of that time just refers to freezing the toolchain and other essential internals, so in practice you’re usually looking at maybe like 3-4 months where your most up-to-date software is being limited to being no newer than 3-4 months old. Which is, in almost all situations… fine 🙂.
I see. In case of issues with new hardware, one can always pick Mesa/the Kernel from Experimental. That’s the beauty of APT, you can mix different branches.