Which Linux distribution is stable yet up-to-date?

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Omer and all,


On Mon, Nov 30, 2015 at 10:53 AM, Omer Zak <w1 at zak.co.il> wrote:

> In another E-mail thread I am discussing selection of a laptop.
> Once a laptop is acquired, I'll want to install one of Linux
> distributions on it.
>
> At present, I am using Debian Stable (today it is Debian Jessie) as the
> host OS of my PC, along with Ubuntu 14.04 inside a VirtualBox based
> virtual machine (Android development environment).
>
> For the new system, I'd like to select an host Linux distribution with
> stable but up-to-date kernel, Docker and a virtualization system
> (VirtualBox or other).  For this, Debian Stable (today's Debian Jessie)
> is not the answer as it gets updated about once each two years.
>
> I'll want to use Docker to run my current Debian Jessie installation and
> the Android development environment (running on Ubuntu). The
> virtualization system will be used to experiment with bleeding edge
> stuff such as new Linux kernel versions, Debian Unstable, GNU/Hurd and
> other exotic stuff.
>
> What is the community's recommendation for a Linux distribution which
> provides stable yet up-to-date versions of the Linux kernel and the
> other basic software tools?
>
>
Well, in general, I believe that when it comes to Linux distributions,
there's a tradeoff between having frequent releases with up-to-date
software and between being as bug-free as possible (what you call
"stable"). Note that it's not all-or-nothing and you can be somewhere in
between on both cases.

Anyway, my favourite distribution for now is Mageia (see
http://www.mageia.org/en/ ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mageia . It has a
release roughly every 9 months, and also has the "Cauldron" branch which
like Debian Testing ends up stabilising on the next release. I'm a Mageia
contributor and am using Mageia Linux x86-64 v5 on my relatively old Acer
laptop and Mageia x86-64 Cauldron on my Core i3 desktop machine.

Recently, I noticed some occasional freezes with the Cauldron system, and
in order to investigate, I decided to remove and avoid using VirtualBox,
which caused my kernel to become tainted due to it deemed buggy by the
kernel developers. After I removed VirtualBox, I didn't have any freezes,
but I'll have to see if they may still and in the meanwhile, I decided to
try using KVM instead.

Otherwise I'm happy with Mageia, which has quite a few of what I call "cute
bugs" but with easy workarounds.

Mageia is an open-source distribution (but not considered purely "free" by
FSF/Stallman zealots) and is maintained by a community of volunteers.

Some other distributions I used or played with:

* Archlinux - a rolling release distribution with a very user-unfriendly
installation method (using Manjaro or whatever for their installers should
be better) and with a tendency to be left in an unusable state if one
forgets to update it frequently enough (which is a problem where Manjaro
won't help you). Arch is fast and free of fluff, but you need to have a lot
of discipline to update it frequently enough or you're screwed.

* Fedora - seems nice and usable, but I still prefer Mageia.

* CentOS - also usable and stable, but upgrading between major versions is
reportedly unsupported.

* Debian Testing .

* Ubuntu - I dislike its default Unity desktop, but I can usually install
Xfce or whatever instead easily enough. I haven't used it a lot outside VMs.

Regards,

-- Shlomi Fish






> --- Omer
>
>
> --
> The key to making programs fast is to make them do practically nothing.
> Mike Haertel (original author of GNU grep)
> My own blog is at http://www.zak.co.il/tddpirate/
>
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-- 
------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/

Chuck Norris helps the gods that help themselves.

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