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 freeze cycle normally lasts 6-8 months. (Edit: It has multiple stages, some of which might not affect you at all.)
One thing to be aware of if you choose Testing or Unstable: They’re generally not covered by the Debian Security Team, so security fixes might not arrive as consistently as with Stable.
You could always just start with Stable and plan to migrate to Testing or Unstable if you ever have a need. Stable + Backports is a good middle ground for some people.
You can integrate
debsecanwithaptand pull security updates fromexperimentalandunstableas demonstrated here, linked and recommended here.