Two years into full-time Linux and I’m finally burning the distro-hopping cycle. I fell for the Arch/AUR trap for a while, but I got tired of spending my weekends debugging file manager crashes instead of maintaining my home lab.
Switched back to Fedora, and it’s boring in exactly the way I need it to be. It’s a stable launchpad for my projects, not the project itself.
Are you on the stable branch? Curious how it is for gaming. I was having issues on Mint (which is similarly stable), but they all went away when I swapped to PikaOS, kinda skipped over Debian
So in packages.debian.org , you can search different versions of debian (stable/testing/unstable) and see which version of the package for a certain… thing they offer by default, eg :
https://packages.debian.org/trixie/fastfetch
Shows that trixie (stable) has fastfetch 2.40.4dfsg-1 . Forky (testing) has 2.62.1+dfsg-1 , sid (unstable) has 2.66.0+dfsg-1.
It’s great, the bad experiences I’ve had are due to my shitty non muxing or whatever dual graphics card laptop, which pika won’t fix. Just make sure you check your card is supported by the current version of the driver. I’ll reply again to show you where you can look for that info.
I’m assuming you can also “back port” it from unstable.
Pika might fix that actually. Most of the patches and custom stuff Pika adds is around obscure and difficult graphics card configurations, with extra kernel modules and stuff like that specifically for gaming on modern graphics hardware. That’s literally its main value proposition. You could try a LiveUSB and see if it works any better, but the PikaOS second-stage installer (after the base system is installed) also has a bunch of options for various driver and kernel versions and variations that might help.
That said if you’re happy where you’re at there’s no reason rocking the boat, and Debian’s pretty solid. But maybe keep it in mind for next time you feel like trying something different on that system.
Yes, but I tried Pika after realising I had the issue, and it didn’t solve it, so I’m good. Like you said, this OS is stable and there’s no use rocking the boat.
Also, I prefer the security of the slow and steady direct debian packages instead of the packages as looked after by two guys.