Debian testing exists. It’s just not well promoted or publicly presented for that matter. But it’s not really any further behind than Ubuntu.
Also open suse tumbleweed. Is great. When you want something more up to date than fedora. But don’t want large chunks of your operating system to stop functioning randomly on an update like Arch. Because they pushed an intentionally breaking change, but nothing to fix it. And you happened not to read all 1000 change logs for the update, missing the relevant one.
I love Arch, but I wouldn’t touch it for desktop these days. I seriously don’t have the bandwidth to read 1000s of change logs every couple days. On an appliance or server? Sure. Most recently VLC stopped playing mkv files. Why?! A packaging change. Instead of a few large packages/dependencies. They were all broken out granularly. Which is fine. But since you didn’t have all the new packages installed before. All functionality moved to them just went poof. I don’t have enough fingers to count the times this sort of thing has happened over the years. It’s part of why i’m slowly transitioning to tumbleweed on most of my desktop systems from Arch.
I’ve been on Debian Testing maybe 15 years at this point. It’s great. Though wouldn’t recommend it if you need out of tree drivers or are starting out. If that’s still not close enough to the edge there is always Sid and Franken Debian if you want to mix and match (not recommended, but can be useful).
It’s nice to have your more-up-to-date desktop systems with the same packaging system as your Stable servers.
Ubuntu users here wanted to go Debian, but also want to live in the current world.
Kubuntu with
--minimal-install(nosnapfuckery) has been my unironic “S-Tier” computing experience in life.Kubuntu slaps
Debian isn’t that far behind. (0-2 years) If you want the latest packages don’t choose Debian.
If you want something newer go for Fedora or maybe even Arch.
Debian testing exists. It’s just not well promoted or publicly presented for that matter. But it’s not really any further behind than Ubuntu.
Also open suse tumbleweed. Is great. When you want something more up to date than fedora. But don’t want large chunks of your operating system to stop functioning randomly on an update like Arch. Because they pushed an intentionally breaking change, but nothing to fix it. And you happened not to read all 1000 change logs for the update, missing the relevant one.
I love Arch, but I wouldn’t touch it for desktop these days. I seriously don’t have the bandwidth to read 1000s of change logs every couple days. On an appliance or server? Sure. Most recently VLC stopped playing mkv files. Why?! A packaging change. Instead of a few large packages/dependencies. They were all broken out granularly. Which is fine. But since you didn’t have all the new packages installed before. All functionality moved to them just went poof. I don’t have enough fingers to count the times this sort of thing has happened over the years. It’s part of why i’m slowly transitioning to tumbleweed on most of my desktop systems from Arch.
Arch definitely has an audience. I think it is very much for those who like to tinker and play with Linux rather than those who want stability.
I personally wouldn’t recommend Debian testing as it has way less packages and slower security updates.
I’ve been on Debian Testing maybe 15 years at this point. It’s great. Though wouldn’t recommend it if you need out of tree drivers or are starting out. If that’s still not close enough to the edge there is always Sid and Franken Debian if you want to mix and match (not recommended, but can be useful).
It’s nice to have your more-up-to-date desktop systems with the same packaging system as your Stable servers.
Edit: and no snaps