Why I Switched from Arch to Debian

i had to make the switch from arch to debian for a couple of reasons but then i ended up enjoying a few things more about it and i think it's actually pretty great now the question is will i keep using it or will i switch back to arch [Music] hello youtube it's dorian so i'm back home now in canada i've been away for over seven months and i spent a bit of time with my family and i'm back at it now set up a new workstation new production machine everything's running slick now and some of you may know that i'm a rolling release user and arch user by the way but on my trip overseas i had to make a change so why did i switch well it had nothing to do with arch itself but more of my situation on my travels i was stuck in accommodations with very poor internet and on a good day i was getting 300 to 350 kilobit per second downloads but my average was more like 150. this made a rolling release really hard to keep up to date at one point it said i had over 1.5 gigs of updates but i think this was when known 3.36 was released but even before that it said i had over 400 megs of updates then i had another one gig of updates and this wasn't going to work with my internet connection even if i left it going all night it wouldn't finish because i kept getting disconnected from the network unfortunately with arch you can't set your updates to only download security updates to minimize your update sizes it's either all or none fortunately i had downloaded a bunch of recent isos before i left home so i had a recent point release for debbie and buster i was able to make room on my drive to add debian along with my other distros and after the installation i performed an update and it only had downloaded like 120 megs which was great you can see here all the various distros that i have on both my drives so i'm booted back into arch here i just rebooted to show you uh arch linux running gnome 3.36 and if i open the package manager you can see that i have two gigs of downloads for updates right now a thousand and three packages now this wasn't the only huge update that i had if you look at this screenshot here from back in april you can see there was another almost two gigs of updates that needed to be downloaded and then there's always conflicts with do you want to replace this with that during updates and then i had things that required manual intervention several times which is fine when you know i'm at home just toying with it whatever but using it as a work machine and needing it to be reliable i didn't have time to do all these updates i didn't have time to be continually checking the arch page to see what manual intervention i had to perform so this was really causing me some grief and then i came home to my production machine which had been sitting for months and had all kinds of updates that needed to be done and that was fine i performed all the upgrades on my production machine and then it just wouldn't boot into arch anymore so i tried to ch root into it i tried a few things and it just would not go so that was it i had had it but on my trip i had installed debian and just started using that and it was fantastic i only had a few security updates now and then and that was pretty much it and now the pros and cons of a rolling release versus a fixed release is that of course with fixed releases you get stable but older software with less updates to download and with a rolling release you get recent software as it comes out with a lot more to download and more often now this doesn't mean fixed releases aren't as secure because you do still get security updates regularly and you'll get patches as soon as vulnerability is discovered but you'll also get updates for software when major bugs need fixing so you're not going to be completely left with broken software now some people might complain that packages are way too out of date but honestly that doesn't make it unusable that just makes a little older a workaround for this is to use flat packs or snaps or even app images i personally recommend flat packs over snaps but if you prefer snaps then use them instead this will give you much more recent software versions without sacrificing performance myself for example i could just switch to my host machine here and i can show you libreoffice 7 which is running as a flat pack on debian 10. no real performance loss everything runs quick and fast and no worries there but other than that you'll typically keep the same versions of software until the next major release is published now i've never done a review on debian before which is strange to be honest now the downside to debian would be the installer which a lot of people don't like so i'll just fire up a virtual machine here you can have look graphical install there is a workaround to this the installer isn't terrible but it's not exactly user friendly i'm sure you've seen it before i'm just going to skim through a bunch of this here so yeah it's it's all text and whatever it's not very nice a lot of people don't like it especially the partitioning part however i'm going to show you something different if you just do a quick google for debian live isos it'll take you to a link where you can download live images so here you would choose either torrent on the left or the full isos on the right and it'll take you to this page where you have all the different flavors so cinnamon gnome kde and so on so you just pick your download load it up so now we're booted into the debian live iso and one of the options right here is to install debian and it's the calamari's installer which is a much nicer graphical um installer much better partitioning way easier than the old debian installer so if the installer is what you hate download the live version and it's just way better and just out of curiosity here let me just shut this down i'm just gonna do a an update and just see one package can be updated for uh 246 kilobits kilobytes of archives that need to be downloaded so sure done so that's my updates in debian so major bug fixes and security updates are what you're going to get so now the question is am i going to switch back to arch e not yet as i said i have my main laptop here that you're looking at now now running debian and i also have my host production machine which i've built specifically for recording youtube videos it is now running debian cinnamon and i know some of you are probably shocked that it's not gnome but i thought you know i'll try something different something simpler something quick uh it's running dual screen so i have obs on my other screen up there and i really like it so far it is stable it is reliable which is the point i don't want a ton of updates i don't want um manual intervention you know if i jump on my system i have work to do or i have a video to edit or something i don't want to have to sit there and troubleshoot my system i want to get in get it up and running do what i need to do and then move on now that's not to say that i'm not going to keep experimenting with other distros i have several other distros installed on my main laptop which i use for work and for play so debian will stay as my main distro of choice for now i have other stuff on my laptop like silver blue cubes and it's not labeled but i even have elementary os on here so really as long as i still have the software that i need to use and it's up to date enough to work and it's not broken there's no real need for me to change anything i'm still getting my security updates and my major bug fixes the patches so i don't really need anything else i will continue to play with stuff i have virtual machines to do that i have stuff on other partitions to do that but i'm definitely going to stick with the stability of debian for now both on my main laptop that you're looking at here and on my production machine because as i've mentioned i don't want to have to deal with fixing things when i'm trying to get something done so this was just more of an update video on what's been going on with the systems that i'm using since i've been away for so long i spent the last few weeks with my family and my little baby boy i missed them a lot so i kind of went offline and decided i'm just going to spend time with them for a little while and now it's time to get back into youtube now i've got my new setup and i'm kind of excited for that i also um updated my graphics card and i got a new capture card for my production machine so hopefully i'll be a lot more efficient and be able to make some some nicer video some smoother stuff with that my my old one died on me so anyways as always you can also follow me over on twitter at dorian dot slash and if you'd like to contribute to my channel head on over to patreon.com dorian dot slash till next time bash on

Channel: DorianDotSlash

Views: 135,738

Rating: 4.8812561 out of 5

Keywords: debian, arch, linux, apt, gnome, debian 10, debian gnu/linux, debian linux, debian buster, debian os, arch linux, debian stability, debian stable, debian is better, debian vs arch, switched to linux, debian testing, backports, back ports, packages, switched to debian, distro, debian distro, debian distribution, debian10, debian install, arch vs debian, switch to debian, arch to debian, why switch to debian, stable distro, stable linux distro, stable distribution

Id: EUHmEO3_zjU

Length: 10min 16sec (616 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 08 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/reversebit]

Nice. and the new moto should be "I used to use Arch BTW". Both distros are more than fine. But in my opinion debian shines as a server too.

[u/qubesuser01]

is there a written summary?

i am in a similar situation (using arch now, expecting to go Debian in the future).

[u/ztherion]

Debian does some things better than Arch. Its great for old hardware, it supports a wider variety of CPU architectures, and once you are up and running most of the maintenance can be done on full autopilot. One of my favorite server distros alongside CentOS.

[u/mzs47]

He lists some of the reasons why I adore Debian, it is such a simple and accessible distro from places that have low bandwidth, like tier II and III cities in India. :)
Even Ubuntu LTS becomes a chore seeing the volume of updates.

[u/SJWcucksoyboy]

I also switched from Arch to Debian. Personally I'm not a big fan of the AUR, it's a very hacky way of installing software and one which I've had problem with before. And debs almost eliminate my need for the AUR and are much less hacky IMO. Also although it's rare for something to break in arch it does happen and stresses me out a bit which debian doesn't.

[u/thehotery]

short: why i’m switched to debian - i have poor internet connection.

[u/alexishdez_lmL]

Are you actually the guy speaking?

[u/eagle848]

Debian servers 15 plus years Pop os 3+ years still looking on desktop Pop os is good but I think there something better

Anyone ? On desktop

[u/unannunciated]

I like netplan on ubuntu. Hate networkmanager. So my mediaserver / container nuc runs ubuntu ... my laptop runs bullseye. Heh !