Maybe what I’m looking for is the holy grail, but what do you guys suggest as a Distro with a good balance between stability and up-to-date packages?

  • Hymenopterror@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I have been using Gentoo exclusively on my desktop and ThinkPad for 7 months now and I reeeaaally like it. It’s a rolling release distro but you’re able to set your system to only use versions of packages marked as stable by default, then using a simple config file you can select which packages you want the newest, bleeding edge versions for. This allows you to have a customizable blend of stability and newness. With Gentoo, the package manager does have to compile your packages from source, but a lot of big packages (like Firefox or the kernel) have binary options as well, and with modern hardware most packages don’t take very long to compile.

    • Zucca@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Note that mixing stable and unstable (~) isn’t offically supported on encouraged. You sure will get still help on the forums still. Many people mix stable and unstable, me included. When I need to unmask a unstable package I’ll limit the unmasking by providing some version limit. For example: <category/package-1.3.9999. This way next major version bump won’t be automatically installed via @world update. It’s not bullet-proof, but better than blindly unmasking every unstable version of a package.