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As a mid-power user I almost exclusively use them just because I want my software up to date. for example using discover I can update all my godot installs on all my devices to the latest features I’m seeing everyone rave about. (this is mainly for the maintainers but it trickles down)

Looking back into when I first was dipping my toes in linux though things like missing libraries and other scary looking apt errors essentially meant I didn’t go further from there and accepted not installing the package. I could see this frustrating lots of users early and causing them to return to windows as I did for a bit.

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sxan@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Do you mean Snap/Flatpack? If so, you will probably have even more up-to-date software if you used a rolling release distro like Arch.

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- carlytm@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  In my experience Arch is pretty unstable, though. I’ve never had an Arch installation that didnt break by the end of the month. Flatpaks allow me to use a stable base like Debian while having certain programs more up to date.
  
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  - sxan@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I… wow. I’ve installed versions of Arch on at least 8 different computers, two of which are being used in other states by my geriatric, technology-ignorant parents. I’ve only had my own PCs break, through my own messing with them (converting root FS from ext4 to btrfs, or replacing systemd with dinit, for example). The ones my parents are running have not had any problems.
    
    In fact, I replaced the default Debian-based distro on my MIL’s computer (an ODroid I set up for her for browsing) with Arch because one of the Debian upgrades broke the soundcard to the point that I couldn’t get it running again. Arch, boom, everything worked again. I log in remotely every week or so and do an upgrade; I was thinking, in fact, of setting up an (very discouraged) -Syu --noconfirm because, in almost a year, I’ve never had an upgrade cause problems. Her’s is an edge case; she logs into a full screen Firefox with no window manager (that she can see), because that’s the only thing she does on the computer: browse, watch web videos, listen to web stream music.
    
    A better case is probably my VMs; they’re actually running services used by several family members: email, photoprism, mealie, gotosocial, etc. I do tend to choose Go-based services, and that probably contributes to the general reliability. Still, I’ve only had one issue where one server was mysteriously rebooting at odd times, and I simply could not get enough forenic evidence to track down the cause. I replaced it in a new install in a different geography and migrated the services there, and the problems stopped. I think the underlying server host was twitchy, TBH, but it’s possible that the original could have been hacked.
    
    Heck, I just recently swapped the root nvme and home ssd out of a Ryzen 5 machine into a newer Ryzen 7, and it booted straight into the login no problem. My current uptime is 26 days - which reminds me, I should probably do a reboot to pick up the 6.5.8 kernel.
    
    Anyway, having gone through the journey of personally running and administering Redhat, Gentoo, Ubuntu, and Arch on dozens of machines over the past 20 years, Arch has been the singlemost stable and reliable distro (across upgrades) that I’ve used. It honestly surprises me when I hear other people who’ve had the opposite experience.
    
    I believe you, but it’s still surprising to me.
    
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  - Sethayy@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Exactly this is why I haven’t made the switch yet.
    
    Its like letting a package be managed per package instead of per distro, giving its devs some more fine grain control on stability vs update speed
    
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