- This topic has 5 replies, 2 voices, and was last updated Sep 7-12:15 pm by Brian Masinick.
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Brian Masinick
https://lottalinuxlinks.com/sid-to-arch/
This article describes moving from Debian Sid to Arch. I agree with the premises of the article; Debian Stable is an excellent system for servers; Debian Testing or Sid are terrific for desktop and laptop use.
The only thing that Debian doesn’t do as seamlessly as Arch is manage building software from sources; it does, but Arch Linux has AUR,
I agree with that and also that Debian is far more secure; the recent debacle with GRUB on Arch/EndeavourOS is a good example; they’re both good distributions but when it comes to stability Debian and Slackware are better than the rest; antiX is a great Debian based distribution that features great efficiency and alternative scheduling options such as runit and sysvinit.
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Brian Masinick
techore
Brian,
A bit late, but I just found this post. 🙂
Interesting article for I have not used SID. Thank you.
I went from two and half years of using Arch or Arch derivative to Debian Stable to avoid the frequent package updates and breaks. I do miss AUR. If I had only one computer or, maybe, two, I might have stayed with Arch but I found maintaining it burdensome for all my assets.
I don’t regret the time invested in Arch and AUR. As a result, I am far more confident downloading and compiling sources. An invaluable experience and excellent distro. Arch would be much better if it had not moved to systemd. 😛
Brian Masinick
To be honest, any of the Debian-based systems, even Sid, are more “stable” in their rigorous standards to keep them, in the long run, working and usable, as the article states.
The stability of Arch Linux and its derivatives, especially EndeavourOS, HAVE considerably improved over the years, and yet only recently, after a couple of years of really solid stability, the development version of the GRUB2 boot loader had a bug that caused some systems to malfunction to the point that only a Live image boot and subsequent reinstall of grub (using grub-install) would fix it. If you were just running EndeavourOS, using their live image was enough to fix it but in my case, I experimented further with boot loaders and ending up reinstalling not only EndeavourOS, but also siduction and PCLinuxOS, before I found a better solution. I didn’t have to reinstall any of them, I merely had to reconfigure the boot loader, but in my case, I actually used our recovery tool, made a mistake and further botched everything up.AS I preach repeatedly, some form of backup and recovery is key; fortunately my personal data is in the Cloud, so I could rebuild any of my personal directories; same with the distributions; I have physical USB Flash Drives of all of them; I just made more work for myself than necessary by essentially “blowing up” (obliterating) the UEFI boot loader.
All of the disk partitions (EXCEPT the UEFI boot partition) was fine; I didn’t know that since the UEFI was broken.The key points to this story:
* Keep backups (I had Cloud backup data and USB Flash Drive system backups.
* Read up on problems; (I did, but I made a “mistake”); it was GOOD practice though!The other point is that this craziness all happened in the Arch distro tree; had it not been for the GRUB failure this would not have happened at all, and it didn’t appear in antix, siduction, or PCLinuxOS.
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Brian MasinickBrian Masinick
techore
I want to be careful we don’t wander too far from the topic of this post but I wanted to share a reply to your linked post that resonated with me.
keybreak, Dev ISO tester
11dWe were already considering moving away from grub by default and that may happen at some point in the future.
rEFInd?
I moved to rEFInd several years ago and never looked back. ..and, I agree on your guidance for backups.
Brian Masinick
Boot loaders are a relevant topic for any systems but especially for those who boot more than one system on their computer.
Grub has plenty of capability and the Super GRUB LOADER image can come in handy for resolving booting issues.
As far as Sid goes as long as I multi-boot it’ll probably be in my collection of systems, as well as antiX. On my oldest computer systems antiX is the only one consistently in use.
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Brian Masinick
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