Linux

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 I need packages that aren't years out of date, so they're all installed through nix home-manager.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.

@JackbyDev The "Out of date" is good for a server, as long as security patches are backported (debian does this). Out of date is not good for a desktop. I want to get the new releases of the Window Manager, office suite, browser, etc.

If you’re a software developer or an enthusiast, you’ll notice it immediately. You’ll be reading and hearing about the new release of the BestThingEver 3.14, you’re totally hyped up about it. You rush to install BTE to experience how awesome it is only to find out that the Debian repos still have a BTE 2.0.5 and none of the cool new features everyone has been talking about for the last 6 months.

Oh, that didn’t sound familiar? If you can’t tell the difference between two versions of a particular application, Debian will be perfectly fine for you.

Debian ships a new release every 2 years.

You can use flatpak to get the latest apps. If you need the latest CLI software use containers. The entire point of Debian is to have a solid base system to build off of.

For a server? I want it out of date, so long as "out of date" means "older versions with backported security patches".

I'm boring and don't care about the new whizzy crap, because if it's working now and it's secure, I'm not touching it. There is no feature you can offer me that will make me want to update a stable working server, so don't screw with what version of software I'm running.

For desktop use? Give me KDE Plasma 6.2 right now, not three years from now. I need that new shit in my veins, so hurry the hell up.

So I mostly use Debian stable on anything server-y, and Fedora on anything desktop-y.

And, I posted this just a few days ago, but I don't like, at all, going outside of distro repos on Debian for packages.

You end up with dependency chain issues in dpkg/apt, because dpkg is super hyper prone to them anyways, and have installs you can't easily just update or upgrade because it can't figure out what in the hell you've done to it.

So I just uh, don't use 3rd party repos for updated versions of things unless it's utterly critical to do so and/or accept that at some point I'm doing a clean install for a migration because shit will be so broken you can't pull it to the current stable version because of the 3rd party software.

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.

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.

Debian is on a roughly 2 year release cycle, and typically has a 6 month (-ish) freeze leading up to the release. So software in the stable release will generally be somewhere between 6 months and 2 years out of date. (My math might be a bit off but hopefully you get the idea).

Ultimately, it comes down to how you use your system, and what you need/want from your software. What you consider to be "the things that matter" will really be the deciding factor here. Need the occasional newer version of an application or library? It's probably fine. Need the latest, greatest desktop environment? You may want to pass.

There are a number of ways to install newer versions. Backports, if it has what you want, is the easiest and safest.

There are other ways as well, but depending on what method you choose and what software it is, you may need to be careful not to break something. (I'd recommend not adding random third-party deb repositories for this reason).

Flatpak seems reasonable, but I haven't used it much (once or twice I think). I typically use backports, or occasionally do my own local backports from sid.

Snap and AppImage are also possibilities. I don't use snap, and I think I installed something proprietary by AppImage exactly once.

If it's not in Debian at all, then I need to handle that a bit differently. But to me that's a different issue than the 'old version' issue that Debian is often derided for.

Anecdotally, I've been daily-driving Debian stable (including for gaming) for over 20 years, and it suits my needs well. But of course, YMMV.

What do you mean by "out of date" exactly?

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...

I typically just build from source anything that I absolutely need a newer release of.

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.

If you want the bleeding edge go Sid.

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.