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What is a good "eternal" Linux distribution?
I need to put Linux on a laptop, but I'm afraid I may not be around to upgrade to major versions (which usually means reinstalling everything) and maintaining the machine. Something like Arch or Manjaro (which I use) might be good because I wouldn't ever need to reinstall the OS, but stability leaves a lot to be desired for a non-technical user. So I was thinking of getting something with an enormous support lifecycle, like Rocky Linux (10 years). Is that a terrible idea?
Now that is 2022, you could install a Ubuntu 22.04 LTS flavour that will not need a major update until 2027. It'll be surprising if the laptop reaches that date in a good state (and if so, the update process will rarely fail, at least in my experience).
I would vote for Kubuntu/Lubuntu, depending in the proficiency of the user.
Ubuntu 22.04's standard support ends in 2027, though its full end of life of support isn't until 2032. I've got a somewhat neglected desktop still on Ubuntu 16.04 and it still gets browser updates among a few other things, apparently until 2026. If you're not running a bunch of internet-exposed server software or regularly installing new programs that might depend on newer libraries, at least having an updated browser is probably good enough.
Debian stable doesn't fuck around when it comes to stability. You can set it to auto-upgrade and that's safe (unlike with testing or unstable which do occasionally break).
Software is a little behind when it comes to versions but as always you can have new or stable, not both.
I'm inclined to use Debian since it seems that Stable is at the start of the lifecycle right now. A great opportunity to get the most out of a solid stable distributions out there. I previously had difficulty getting Debian to recognize hardware, particularly wireless cards in some of my computers. That is the only potential issue for this laptop I think.
Debian's insistence on completely Free does mean you sometimes have to dick about with non-free packages and sometimes even non-free repos (Deb-multimedia represent yo) to get things entirely working, but on the other hand, I think it's good that Debian sticks so hard to it's FOSS principles.
The "unofficial" (official in all but name) non-free including firmware images should be bootable and give you working wifi on just about anything. It's been a long, long time since I've had hardware issues with Debian. But then I know my way around it pretty well so that probably helps.
Oh yeah, I actually had difficulties even with the non-free ISOs. But maybe that was sorted out, it's worth a try.
A bit off-track, but NixOS. It just won't update unless every package builds successfully. I have a raspberry Pi that automatically fetches latest changes every night at 4AM. It then proceeds to build the system and only switches if successful. It also reboots automatically, only if it is necessary. The time and frequency of updates is entirely and very easily configurable.
Oh and by building, I do not mean compiling every package. NixOS kinda generates or builds a new system state for every set of updates so despite everything if something does break, you can just boot into previous state, which is quite noob friendly.
Which Raspberry Pi are you using and did you use a guide to set it up?
I have a Raspberry Pi 4 that I've been running NixOS on for a while, but I've had issues with updating (the wifi stops working after updating so I've been stuck at the same version for a long time) and recently the working install broke (some important files corrupted) so I've been looking to reinstall.
This is the guide I used before.
I find that a lot of times the stuff in the NixOS wiki is very out of date so I'm hoping there's some better guide that you know of.
Pi 4 here too. Wiki is really bad and confusing. This is cleaner: https://nix.dev/tutorials/installing-nixos-on-a-raspberry-pi.
Can't tell for WiFi. I had been reading up on general Pi issues for a while before, so boot from SSD and connected via Ethernet. Have literally not touched it since March, only SSH into it every month or so to check if it is updating correctly.
It has been zero maintenance. It runs syncthing, navidrome and PiHole, so any failure would be detected near immediately. But no complaints, no babysitting needed for 6 months now. 10/10 recommended.
Depending on what you're doing NixOS could be a great idea because it's just stupid easy to manage the system. Like if I had to install a Linux distro for a friend who wouldn't touch it and wouldn't need admin rights or anything I'd almost be tempted to put NixOS on their machine because then I could just give them a config file and not need to give them a list of commands any time something needs to be set up or updated...
Sounds like this might not be exactly what they're looking for, but even if NixOS isn't normally a beginner friendly OS... It might not actually be a horrendous idea to set it up for somebody else. It'd even be easy to spin up a VM of their system to test something remotely.
All of the praise for NixOS in this thread is true.
But, a big fat caveat is that, unless things changed dramatically in the past few years, its support for DEs is still pretty weak. I had to switch to a different distro because way too often Plasma was plagued with NixOS-specific issues that it took forever (or sometimes never) to fix.
I haven't had that experience, but I'm just on xmonad. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if that was the case -- NixOS is a bit of an odd-ball.
In general, though, I was on NixOS back in 2011 and abandoned it because it was... kind of a mess back then and wasn't really delivering on its promises in my opinion. Builds weren't really reproducible, and everything broke constantly. A lot of that has changed for me recently with the advent of flakes, and I've gone pretty hard into nix / NixOS now. It's pretty clear to me that NixOS is moving way faster these days. A lot more people are working on it, packages get updated pretty quickly, and issues get fixed fairly fast. Plus, in my experience when something goes wrong it's easier to deal with than on other distros. For instance recently I had problems with wireplumber going into an infinite loop and sucking up a lot of CPU and battery life after my computer suspended. This wasn't a NixOS specific issue, it was an issue with wireplumber, but it was super easy to apply patches to wireplumber before they were even merged into the stable wireplumber branch (let alone merged into NixOS's package). The ease of patching these kinds of things is a huge win in my experience, but I'm also willing to get my hands a bit dirty. The other thing is that any configuration I do doesn't feel like a waste anymore, because it's easy to maintain and carry that configuration onto future machines, without just adding to the pile of things I have to remember and manually set up.
What kind of issues were you experiencing with Plasma, and how long ago was this? Were you using stable channels, or were you on unstable?
I think your caveat is important, though. NixOS works quite a bit differently than other linux distros, so sometimes there are unexpected issues that pop up. My experience lately has been rock solid, but that certainly wasn't the case 10 years ago, and I wouldn't be surprised if you run into something that doesn't work entirely perfectly depending on what kinds of software you use. But that said, I don't think this caveat is big enough to avoid trying NixOS these days. There are huge advantages to be had, and you'd be doing yourself a disservice by not at least taking a peek at what it has to offer :). In my personal experience the issues you might encounter aren't that common anymore and are often easily dealt with.
I used it between 2013 and 2019 and tried both the stable and unstable channels.
For starters some packages were missing, and it took forever to add them (some are still missing). And given that some KDE devs are actually using NixOS, I suspect it’s not about being lazy, but actually it being difficult.
A major issue I had from time to time was that Akonadi just didn’t work, which means the whole PIM suite of KDE just didn’t work from time to time. There were some other issues, but that one was the most painful.
That sounds super annoying. I don't use any of that stuff, so I wouldn't personally know, but I hope that's getting better over time!
I feel like NixOS / nix has had an unfortunate history. It's been kind of broken for many people at different points in time which gives it a bit of a bad reputation. It's understandable, it's a huge project that in some sense encompasses like... all of computing, so things are bound to go wrong in some areas. But it's definitely ironing out the kinks and getting better and better every month, and it comes with some killer advantages. But yeah, I totally understand that it's left a bad taste in some people's mouths and that they don't want to look at it again (after all, I was one of those people for a decade).
I'm personally at the point where nix / NixOS is just a pure win for me, but it will depend on what software you need and what you do :). The advantages are large enough for me now that I'm also willing to put some effort into patching nix builds and stuff if something isn't quite right too, though that's fortunately pretty rare now!
Thanks! NixOS seems awesome, but I'm not looking into becoming a programmer just now :P
I challenge the idea that Arch or Manjaro have stability problems. Running Arch was probably the least problematic and most hassle-free Linux experience I've ever had. I would guess that non-technical users would have an even easier time (edit--assuming a desktop environment and everything they need to start is already set up for them) since they're less likely to tinker and break things on their own, especially if they stick to the base system through the package manager and use something like Flathub or Snap for other apps.
I use Manjaro. Just last week there was an issue with a package that was not immediately easy to solve. I ended up removing the package altogether from the command line, I'm not sure if it was needed for anything. I don't expect a regular user to be able to do that. Manjaro is okay for me, but I used Debian Stable for a lot longer and I treated it like a fridge, just open and do my thing. Never had an issue.
Yeeeah, I'm kinda souring on Manjaro. It's not adding much on top of arch except make it slightly more stable, but it also adds its own headaches by holding back packages.
I really gotta turn on that virtualization setting in my BIOS so I can spin up a NixOS VM to try that out. I think the declarative fashion should help nicely to make things stable while keeping it up to date and simple to tinker with.
Installing flatpacks with the software manager works very well, which is a first for me. Manjaro has a control manager but there's not a lot there. And there's a utility to install a new kernel. I suppose all of that can be arranged for Arch as well.
I use Pop!_OS on my PC and have been doing since the middle of last year. Since then I've upgraded from 21.04 to 21.10 and then 22.04 LTS, all without having to reinstall.
They're skipping Ubuntu 22.10 to focus on development of their GNOME alternative but as it's an LTS it'll still be supported for a few years.
I've got some opinions:
To me Windows is a good standard for release lifecycle, and it's basically a 6-month cycle with minimal intervention needed. Most six-month distros are pretty up to date unless the base is old (like Debian -> Ubuntu). Many "easy" distros just do this for you like Ubuntu and Fedora anyway with no/minimal fuss.
EndeavourOS: They've recently been doing better than Arch on bug communications, which means if you need to do manual intervention, they've got you covered. It's all vanilla Arch so things shouldn't break in unexpected ways, and if the project dies it'll easily integrate back into Arch. Longevity would by my concern about many Arch derivatives, and if you feel similarly Manjaro isn't too bad a way to go, but they've had some administrative issues, like not updating site certs, and internal drama.
Fedora: Predictable 6mo releases, but you can hold on to a release for 13 months so you can update at your leisure and still get support. It's also thoroughly tested.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed: Uses OpenQA for thorough package testing before pushing anything and is pretty unbreakable from what I've heard.
To answer your direct question, I guess you couldn't go wrong with Rocky or Alma, but the problem is some things like gaming may suffer, or other technologies like Flatpaks if you wanted to depend on them. I honestly don't know so do your own research on those, but it wouldn't be the worst idea to not have to touch your OS for a decade.
I will suggest NixOS, but it's got a bit of a technical hurdle, especially if you like downloading programs from developers, which means more work on your end. Its use of atomic updates makes -unstable perfectly safe to use, even release maintainers have said it's no problem, so you can update at your leisure. It's been around since 2003, so it also has longevity on its side, and stays pretty up to date.
I second EndeavourOS, the community is made up of former experienced members of the Manjaro community who left during the treasurer scandal (IIRC?). They're all very nice and helpful.
On a technical note I think it's better too: they don't delay packages like Manjaro, which has caused more issues in my experience than it's prevented.
I'll second OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Especially now that AMD kernel drivers are a bit more stable, I've not had to rollback an update in over a year.
Their BTRFS root with snapshots before/after software installs and upgrades makes rolling back a bad update painless.
GeckoLinux is what I'd reccomend to non-technical users. It bakes in the various legal grey-area stuff like closed drivers, fonts, and media codecs, smoothing over the install process. Kind of like Manjaro over Arch.
In-between users which are neither gurus nor 'Browser + Office + Steam' might struggle a bit, given that it's its own Linux branch over a Debian or Redhat derivitave. Howto guides for Ubuntu need a bit of translation, and a lot of software outside of their repos often does not consider OpenSUSE.
That said, the
opitool helps cover a lot of the gaps the same way thatAURdoes in Arch, by providing an accessible way to add user-maintained packages with a few short CLI prompts.Don’t use Arch or other rolling release distros then. They’re intended to be updated somewhat frequently. If you’re going to have this in a drawer for year and then try and perform an update you’ll likely have a bad time.
This is honestly loosely true. Over my lifetime with arch (a decade), it’s happened twice, and both times they were easily solvable issues.
I have arch on all my machines and I don’t actively use all of them so sometimes I do upgrade one which hasn’t been upgraded in over a year. It’s fine albeit a lot of shit to download.
It's somewhat unsafe not to update one's Linux packages at least every 6 months. The key software you use daily is likely to have a new moderate to severe security issue made public within that time frame. Web browser, and email program, at the least.
@lou, for context - will this laptop have regular internet access? Understanding where your constraints come from will help with giving advice.
Yes it will. Thanks!
I think I can automate or access remotely for regular updates, but reinstalling the entire system would be an issue.
Thanks!
Oh, I misunderstood you. I'm so used to running a rolling-release type of distro for so many years. I forgot that people actually do "full" OS updates with some distros.
Oh yeah lol. I like Manjaro for now, maybe I'll swith to Arch for myself.
If you can automate things, you can automate the upgrade itself. Remember to also add a Cron job to wipe the pacman cache older than 30 days.
People will tell you not to do it because occasionally you need to read the upgrade log or some such, but let’s be honest you don’t read it anyway. Just keep an eye out for anything weird and pacman does have a log with all its output if you ever need it.
To the best of my knowledge HML has been on the same major release since 2009.
Is this a laptop for someone else? Chrome OS Flex is a thing that can turn old hardware into a decent Chromebook web portal, and it shouldn't need that much troubleshooting if you're willing to make a deal with that particular devil.