LeFantome

I agree with you completely. I am sure you deal with these minor issues quickly and barely notice them half the time.

But users of other distros would find it intolerable to have to deal with these small tweaks on any given day. “My computer is a tool” they will say and “it just needs to work”.

Fair enough. But then they turn around and fight bugs and limitations that were solved for Arch users months or even years ago.

And they fight to install software not in the repos, often making their overall system less reliable in the process.

I prefer the stability of Arch over the stability of Debian thank you.

The problem is that “stable” means two different things in Linux.

It can mean “reliable” as in it does not crash. I think that is what most of us think of.

However, It more often mean “static” or “unchanging”.

Take Debian Stable. It is “stable” because the software versions rarely change outside of security updates. This does not mean it does not crash. It does not mean it does not have bugs. It means you can depend on it to behave tomorrow like it does today. Design problem not the software installed? They are not getting fixed. As an example, you will see that the people saying Wayland does not work are almost always Debian users because they are using software from 2 - 3 years ago. Debian 13 has improved things but the NVIDIA drivers are from 2 years ago even now. And if KDE has fixed a lot of bugs, that does not mean Debian gets those updates.

Arch on the other hand updates its packages constantly to the latest to very recent versions. The behaviour of your Arch system changes all the time as new versions of software are installed. You may like this or you may not but this is “unstable” using Debian’s definition.

From the point of view of robustness, Arch users often have a better experience than Debian users. Things more often “just work” due either to new features or because issues have been resolved in recent versions. Rapidly developing software, let’s take Wayland or NVIDIA again, will often work dramatically better on Arch. However, every update has the potential to break something. And so, on Arch, you are certainly more likely to encounter breakage. Often these problems are very short-lived with fixes appearing quickly. This means that, even if something did break, many Arch users will not even know.

Anyway, this is my take Arch vs Debian:

• Arch is more “robust” (fewer problems on a typical day)
• Arch is very reliable but less reliable than Debian (updates rarely break but they can)
• Arch behaviour changes much more often (more features sooner but also more learning required and occasionally features lost or “get worse”)

So, it all depends on what we mean by stable

Mint has two kernels: a “stable” one and a “hardware enhanced” one (HWE). The HWE kernel is newer to improve support for newer hardware.

Many distros allow you to pick from multiple kernels.

Yes, all Linux kernels come from kernel.org

That said, kernel.org maintains not only a latest but also multiple “stable” kernels that maintained versions of previous kernels. There are usually about a half-dozen kernel versions to choose from.

One you have code from kernel.org, you can change the configuration to get kernels with slightly different capabilities and strengths.

Finally, you can patch the code you get from kernel.org to add or remove whatever you want. For example, you may add in filesystem support or drivers missing in the mainline kernel.

So, in the end, any given Linux distro may have a Linux kernel slightly different from what other distros use. You can probably run any Linux distro on the kernel from any other Linux distro though. In fact, this is what you are doing when you run something like Docker or Kubernetes.

I still use VirtualBox but a version built to work with KVM.

https://github.com/cyberus-technology/virtualbox-kvm

It does not need a kernel module or DKMS because it uses KVM.

Oracle is accused though.

You can use VirtualBox with KVM as well.

https://github.com/cyberus-technology/virtualbox-kvm

You are probably not recompiling the kernel but rather just a kernel module (DKMS). Still annoying.

You do not need a kernel module for the version above as it KVM is already in the kernel. That is why QEMU does not need a kernel module either.

Have not seen suggested alternatives?

Dinit? OpenRC? Runit? S6? SysVinit? InitWare?

Not many seem to know the last one.

https://github.com/InitWare/InitWare

There are more.

I guess a bigger entity could try to start charging for... something... Support, maybe, but that seems unlikely to take off.

Are you aware that Red Hat alone makes billions of dollars per year off Linux?

The FSF approach the microcode is just brain dead.

Most Wayland compositors don not have the concept of multiple windows being one application. And you cannot always control how and where they appear.

This is not a Wayland complaint. Just pointing out that old GIMP was just not very compatible with the core Design of Wayland.

Depending on what compositor you use, a lot of this has really improved.

The biggest “Linux” skill would be package management. It is one of the biggest differences.

Most of the rest of the advice here stems from desktop environment choice.

It depends on the distro and how it feels about shipping non-free software. Fedora, as an example, still ships without them.

Good thing GIMP went single window before Wayland popularity spiked.