My problem with all of those systems is they, by definition, must be very opinionated as to what the base system is. A common counter argument is using various types of “layers” (with differing terminology depending on distro or technology used) but the fact that even for “just” Fedora there are so many bases to choose from shows how that is limited in practice, and slight differences in system preferences makes the “one clean base you can then build from” not as flexible as implied.

I love the idea of them, and definitely recommend them for a new user that doesn’t care what is under the hood, but as soon as you start wanting to change core pieces they start getting more and more in your way, and “rolling back to a clean base” is no longer useful.

I think Nix has the closest ideal to what I would like for myself, but I don’t like the language of its build files and the fact that the recommended way to do things is not the way the official docs describe is too off-putting, so I just run back to my Arch setup. 10 minutes of package selection and installing is more than simple enough for me if I ever need to rebuild and I get to choose exactly what stacks I am using.

I’d rather know what’s going on. Silently working around a problem is how you end up with a system no longer set up the way you think it is.

It’s closed source so you get to cross your fingers that they don’t do anything shitty under the hood!!

Oh, benefits! Sorry I must have read that wrong…

I tried to switch to Mango but it seems to behave weirdly to me with regards to the way focus changes or not when closing window with the keyboard. Not sure how to describe it but as much as I hate the attitude of the Hyprland developer it is the only compositor that behaved the way I expect. I do use the scroller plugin making it a little more like Niri but Niri itself doesn’t behave like I like with multiple monitors and keybinds

I had absolutely no problems updating Debian to 13 from 11 to 12 to 13 one after the other. I also had no problems upgrading between Debian versions when I ran it as my main driver from the Potato release up until Ubuntu came out. Conversely, when I used Ubuntu from its original Warty release to around 2012 or so I had issues on literally every single version upgrade. Most relatively minor, but more than a couple requiring full reinstalls.

I would bet money that the vast majority of those having problems upgrading Debian are on “FrankenDebian” systems. Not all, but I am confident the majority are.

It’s extremely rare. Big breaking updates are normally shown in the arch news. Usually they just require a command or two to remove a conflicting package before the update. I think there’s been a few in the last year, but on the flip side I never got a clean distro update on anything but Debian and they usually took a lot more effort to clean up.

Where it may be “unstable” is if a specific program updates (upstream) with some major change or other, whereas another distro might hold off a while.

“unstable” as in changing regularly. Not in any way to do with how reliable it is (as another comment mentioned, that’s a better way to differentiate).

I’ve had far fewer problems updating arch (once I had a clean system anyway) than I ever did trying to move through distribution updates on various other more “standard” ones.

Nah, I looked at it and it doesn’t interest me. I like arch because, contrary to popular belief, it is quite stable (as in non crashing, not package versions) if you only install exactly what you need. I had way more stability issues on the more standard distros since they had so much extra stuff. Debian for servers every day though.

Nix looks interesting in theory, but is a lot of work and too opinionated for me. Far from an expert though and have nothing against those that like it or any other distro.

Took a look at it and it didn’t grab me. Different preferences for different people. I hope Helix continues to grow but I’ve no interest in it myself.