Didn't even need dmesg this time!

Windows: You got a kernel panic from an update just once this week? I went through two BSODs today!

Mac: It'd happen more often if I actually had software! You get everything!

Arch: While getting updates can cause crashes sometimes, new stuff is fun.

Debian: You guys are getting updates?

Debian: You guys are getting updates and crashes?

Oh we get updates, after all the other distros have spilled their blood all over them for us first. Why do you think they call it bleeding edge?
- Backports don't count

Next update: the same thing breaks again. After searching forums, you notice a pattern going back to 2002.

Is this some sort of Arch joke I'm too stable and usable to understand?

Debian stable. I don't understand why people would want an unstable system.

I get wanting the latest applications, and by that I mean end-user tools one uses frequently, e.g. Blender or Steam, but for anything that those rely on, very very rarely does one genuinely need anything "new" urgently. I'd argue pretty much never but I'd be curious to discover counter examples. Just fa couple of days ago https://lemmy.ml/post/24882836/16154377 arguing about the topic too. Even for drivers for gaming, which are supposedly changing relatively "fast" there is rarely an actual need for it. Quite often it's a desire to get the latest but the actual impact is not that significant.

TL;DR: IMHO stable system with security updates running few bleeding edge apps isolated is the best compromise.

Now that you can get latest software from Flathub, there’s really nothing wrong with Debian “stable” except for more recent hardware support that requires newer kernel at the very least (recent userspace drivers will also come from Flatpak if the software like Steam is also a Flatpak). That is, if the stable repo has all you need and there’s no reason to supplement it with external packages.

There are however perfectly valid reasons for going with rolling to get recent improvements, which I for one care about. For example, now that PipeWire is pretty mature, Debian 13 will ship good version and it will serve well for the next 2-3 years, but some 2 years ago it was really important to get the latest and greatest to have good experience - and even early it was better than PulseAudio would ever be, just still improving rapidly, not ready for full freeze. Other example - KDE Plasma improved significantly from version 6.0 onwards introducing long awaited functionality like fractional scaling, HDR, but also improved stability and general polish. It will only be introduced in Debian 13, one full year after it was introduced.

Lastly, there’s nothing wrong with rolling and it isn't really “unstable”. Using Arch full time for the last 12 years, I only had like 2-3 situations when update actually broke something and it wasn’t my misconfiguration or a skill issue. Even then it could easily be avoided by using linux-lts kernel. In fact my Debian/Ubuntu installs were much less stable as there was always something missing that I needed (in era before Flatpaks or AppImages especially) relying on 3rd party apt repos, causing breakages and conflicts. I would usually upgrade Debian to testing or unstable anyway, so rolling, but one that’s actually open for breakage.
Or, you know, use something like Fedora that gives you both.
- Care to explain how it does in a way that other distributions don't?

Ohh, but the pain of discovering that it broke something important, but not often used, 3 months later....

🤣🤣🤣💀

It's a meme because it's made up and never happens /s

It definitely happens if you upgrade to the next version of your distro while it's still in beta.

You hit a bunch of bugs, and they actually do get fixed around final release time.

Once you're on a stable branch, updates rarely include major changes.

When my arch testing prod server reboots cleanly after a kernel update

I updated the the other day and now my system boots to a grub prompt; I have to type exit and then it starts normally.

I'd figure out how to fix it, but I reboot so infrequently that I keep forgetting about it.

I feel like running grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg would probably fix that.

Disclaimer: I mostly have no idea what I'm talking about.
- Yup! That's definitely the solution
  
  Disclaimer: me neither

I’m in the 4th box where there’s nothing to do so you try something new and botch up systemd or netplan or something enough to warrant a fresh install and start again

What is stable? I just run nix flake update then brew a coffee to accompany me for the next 12 hours

Ackshyually your distro can't get "stable" in an update. "stable" means that the distro should not have any new issues introduced with updates in the first place.

Ackshyually stable only relates to the release schedule. Stability is not reliability.
- ackshyually, we are both right.
  
  I would argue that the reason a slow release schedule is called stable because it aims to achieve stability and reliability.

Which distro? I’ve upgraded Mint on the weekend. The installer failed with an error where i couldn’t get good infos about online.

Then i just rebooted the system out of frustration. Surprisingly it seems to work fine.

Is there a distro where upgrades just work? Maybe Fedora? Or i just install arch on the system, it works great on my server for the last 10 years without reinstall.

EndeavourOS just works on my machine..
- Works on my machine^tm
Atomic Fedora variants. Updates literally mean replacing the system image, so there's nothing to really go wrong.
Bazzite comes to mind.
Debian in particular is rock solid, even Debian Unstable has been very reliable for me if you want a rolling release with newer packages.

But I've also had very few problems with Ubuntu. My mother has used it for ten years at this point and will happily apply any dist upgrade she's presented with, and rarely does she need support.

A pro tip is to check out the alternative desktop environments. A lot of people rightly hate Ubuntu's awful default DE, but it's not a core part of the distro, there are other complete desktop "flavours" available in the repositories and installers that will give you them from the start at https://ubuntu.com/desktop/flavours

(Switching an installed system from one DE to another is in principle as easy as uninstalling one desktop meta-package and installing another, but you got to make sure you get the right packages, or you might run into annoying conflicts, so I would not recommend it for a newbie)

Lol, I run Alpine Linux on edge and nothing ever breaks on reboot.

Famous last words :p
What is there even in alpine, that can break? /s
- Only what I install and little else?

Mmmmmmm stable updates

Upgrading my Nobara from 40 to 41 stopped my nvidia driver crashes in wayland for now, i hope it's not just a fluke :-)

I'm on 40 now considering jumping to 41. Did you have any issues with the update at all? My experience with 39-40 was disastrous. Fortunately the Discord community is amazing.
- No, I just had to remove a few packages which blocked the upgrade. i followed the nobara wiki upgrade page. the only thing i found not working yet was adaptive sync, which caused black screens in games, but i was still on the closed source drivers - nobara switched to the open source ones on 41. i did the switch today, following this guide, but haven't tried it out again yet.

I had this when going from Ubuntu 20 to 22 last week. Luckily the universe made sense again when going from 22 to 24, breaking halfway the installation and putting my laptop in a fucked up state between 22 and 24. Caused me a whole afternoon of headaches

Me hoping 6.13 fixes the AMD iGPU issue introduced with 6.12.

Go back to 6.11

In my experience the only times I've had a stable experience was

when I actually only installed packages I needed i.e using a window manager instead of a DE (and no bloat packages which I'll eventually lose track of)
using an atomic distro, my favourite so far has to be bluefin which is part of the Ublue project based on Fedora Silverblue. NixOS is also great but it gives me the urge to pointlessly tinker instead of getting actual stuff done.

In the past I've seen flatpaks and containers as bloated and messy solutions which tainted my computer but now that I've tried it, It's actually very convenient.

I've always installed a crap ton of packages for gaming which turns into this inevitable mess, but with containers I just use bazzzite-arch and be done with it. It wraps all my gaming packages in one neat container.

No such unicorn exists