Hacker News Reader

Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I just want Debian but with a system whereby system packages are not restricting me just apt-get installing a more modern version of Python because "it could break everything", then run it under a different environment? Let me run user-space apt apps with a different environment and paths to link against.

I want sane bleeding edge, but I dont want to waste hours and days fixing some source distro up just to get wifi working or GPU drivers.

View on HN

For me, my best approximation of "sane bleeding edge" is between Fedora and Arch, each with pros and cons. The thing I love so much about Arch and what I believe is an extremely underrated feature of rolling release distros is that everyone is on the exact same page. There is only one supported version of everything, and that's what's currently in the repos. If something breaks you can go on the forum or the subreddit or whatever and there will be someone else with your problem and someone probably already has a workaround.

Sounds kinda cursed, but running something like Debian sid sucks because there's not many other people doing that. Meanwhile with Arch, there's plenty of people doing all sorts of wacky things, the wiki is really good, and the AUR hugely lowers the burden of random things you installed that weren't provided in repos that you have to remember how to build and update every once in a while.

None of this is relevant to your Python example though.

> Sounds kinda cursed, but running something like Debian sid sucks because there's not many other people doing that.

I am not sure that is correct. I think it is very common for (experienced) people that run Debian to use Debian Testing or Debian Unstable on the desktop and Debian Stable on servers.

Personally, I run Debian Testing with selected packages from Unstable. I rarely have problems with that setup.

This request pattern matches "I just want Debian but [specific software should be bleeding edge]". I don't think that is a request that can be reasonably satisfied since the logical conclusion is a distro where every package is bleeding edge. Maybe containers or somesuch could work?

Python is a particularly gnarly one. The Python community are a lovely crew but they have no particular respect for people who like stability. The 2->3 transition on Debian was unpleasant and I don't think that was because of the Debain maintainers.

This kind of mindset is leading to a lot of work on distros with an immutable core, so your base system is solid but everything else can be whatever you want it to be.

This only applies to desktop apps, but Flatpak does an incredible job of this, making it easy to get the bleeding edge version of some app without your underlying system being bothered by it.

AppImages can help solve this problem for GUI and non-GUI apps alike, but they're not centralised in a nice repo and you have the Windows problem where you have 50 programs bundling the same libraries over and over.

One thing snap got right is it also works for non-desktop apps. Of course, it has its own problems, most notably relying on a proprietary central store.

For non-desktop apps docker/podman is an option, but that doesn't work very well for desktop apps.

Run Debian Stable and install Flatpak. This provides exactly that kind of „different environment“ where bleeding edge software won’t break your system. (Of course, not everything is available as a flatpak. But hopefully that will improve in the future.)

Python's maybe not the best example, since it's pretty easy to build and install to any location you want.

On the other hand, you might want to install Guix and/or Nix on top of Debian.

Sure, but I dont want to have to build any package I want to install, for that I just call it a day and install a source based distro.

Guix and Nix will provide you binaries, installed in /gnu and /nix so they don't conflict with anything else.

Yeah, Debian was designed for the old-school multi-user days where a system was maintained by a dedicated sysadmin. Ultimately linux people will be dragged kicking and screaming onto something with sane library management like NixOS (or else something Snap/Flatpak-based, but I hope not), but it hasn't happened yet.

If I had the time, energy and funds I'd try some mix of Ubuntu (driver supports always been really good OOTB with Ubuntu for me) with something like NixOS package management maybe. I just prefer my distro to be decent OOTB instead of me hacking up solutions.

Well you've got to get it. Google is running on a 2.x Linux kernel, with thousands of patches. The hypervisor runs on bare-metal, and it's not "debian". You need to start thinking about debian as just another virtual system and get with the program. If you're installing an operating system on bare metal, and it's not a bsd with jails, you may be doing it wrong. Or, maybe you have an offline developer's environment bare-metal install, debian, arch, whatever, a linux efistub is enough, and then host a passed thru network vm, in a container, with strong guest to host protections. You do you?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com