this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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I’ve switched to Debian on my Linux machines for the simple reason that Snap on Ubuntu gives me shivers.
I’d forgotten how stable and reliable Debian is. Just install a few gnome extensions and it’s a great desktop.
Debian up until the last couple of years was my go to in the server realm. The desktop side is fine if you want stability. The only real downside on the desktop side is the packages tend to drift in versioning as the distro lifecycle progresses.
Agree on snaps though, never been a fan and I used to be a huge Ubuntu fan pushing that on to family / etc. I haven't given them a shot in a while, the last time I used them (circa 20.04) the performance was not anywhere close to Flatpaks.
These days my primary desktop / laptop driver is OpenSUSE MicroOS and when its not that its usually Fedora / Nix. Server side still remains a mixed bag of Debian and OpenSUSE.
The way Debian always lags behind releases used to be a big issue for me on the server, but I've found that with almost everything being dockerized, it's not that big of an issue. If I need to deploy something that requires the latest version of Python, I just run it in a container.
Having said that, on the desktop, I'm very intrigued by Silverblue. I just don't think it's ready for mainstream usage. And for that matter, I daily drive macOS these days.
Silverblue and MicroOS are very similar in nature. You have a strong immutable rolling core and then everything in user space pretty much runs as containers, flatpaks, etc.
MicroOS I havent had any issues with daily usage for the desktop side. Updates in the immutable layer are applied in a new filesystem level snapshot that you boot into on the next reboot. This also makes it easier to roll back if theres a issue. I think Silverblue does something similar, but not sure. Filesystem snapshots have been a awesome to have feature.
I use MacOS in the workplace, but often prefer my Linux setup over it (but its hard to break a Linux fanboy after 20 years of usage). MacOS im fairly certain enforces a similar immutable based OS under the hood.
With macOS really only the very core of the system is immutable—the kernel, boot loader, stuff like that. The rest is “normal” BSD. And unlike Silverblue, there isn’t really a file system layering.
Also you can turn off system integrity protection with macOS and it behaves like any other BSD system. The whole file system becomes read/write but otherwise keeps working as before.