Maybe what I’m looking for is the holy grail, but what do you guys suggest as a Distro with a good balance between stability and up-to-date packages?
Maybe what I’m looking for is the holy grail, but what do you guys suggest as a Distro with a good balance between stability and up-to-date packages?
Void Linux. A great compromise between being up to date and being stable AF. They’re not bleeding edge, but cutting edge, most definitely. For example, they only recently transfered to kernel 6.3, while Arch had it months ago… with instability issues I might add. Void maintainers would rather let these wrinckles get ironed out than implement the latest and greatest.
It is a rolling release distro, so nothing new there. Packages get regular updates, same as any other rolling release distro, except for the kernel packages which are carefully examined before being submitted in the repo. The number of precompiled packages is not huge, but the src templates are (you just have to compile them from source with xbps-src, which is a piece of cake when you already have the template file).
The good thing is that all package templates get checked for buildability (test) on GH. If the template passes all tests, it makes it in the repo, if not, it doesn’t, simple as that.
If you think you would be comfortable with Arch, you’d be comfortable with Void as well 😉.
Besides those builders that run the checks made by the developers of the apps (is simple running a
make checkor whatever the build system the package uses, void Linux does have some problems mostly because of the small team.One of the biggest one is basically being stuck in 1.X series of musl forever until someone steps up and creates a solution that doesn’t require to rebuild all packages because of an ABI breaking change in armv6l systems at 2.X musl series .