I’m thinking of choosing Debian instead. I’m a student, low on budget, and wanna play with linux and laptops, and I think Arch or Cachy OS need updates or distro upgrades(?) weekly or something?
Solved: up to date Arch can last for 2 decades on my cheap laptop, and use Flatpak for older versions of software.
With Arch-likes its ever so slightly harder to roll back package versions but still doable.
Considering kernel maintainers are only now removing support for i486 and i586 you will be fine for a long time with anything from the past 2 decades.
And push comes to shove you can just tell your package manager to not update something and not worry about it.
Like mentioned though, there are a lot of upgrades and they are constant so if bandwidth is a problem, a Debian-like might be more for you.
“Considering kernel maintainers are only now removing support for i486 and i586 you will be fine for a long time with anything from the past 2 decades.”
That sounds great, but still you need to download the latest release, and the newest software.
That’s the neat part, you don’t need to. You can just install any Linux distro and not upgrade. Obviously bad for security but you aren’t forced to upgrade ever.
My server is running a Debian-like and I’ve found release updates to be the most nerve racking process ever. Updating package repos and waiting for the whole system to refresh all the packages and fussing over what needs backports because a package is not in the new release repo… I dread it every year.
For arch I just have a snapper pacman hook to automatically create snapshots for my btrfs system so I can roll back if an update is just not working. Then just wait a few days and try again.
Both the system have updates which are often rolled out. You can choose not to update, or can set the system to update automatically. You shouldn’t be worried about updates. The os will keep on working on your laptop regardless of how many updates it receives.
Unless by low budget you mean a 2010 cheap laptop, you won’t have problems with either of the systems.
That won’t really be a problem. If you have old/slow hardware, I’d just recommend a lightweight DE and you shouldn’t really have any performance issues crop up in the future.
And yes it’s best to update rolling release distros frequently. I update every day and with my internet (150Mbit/s) it takes like 1-2 minutes. Don’t worry if you’re away from your computer for a while though, weekly updates should actually be enough and it’s no problem if you’re away for a few weeks usually.
What
As others have mentioned, you’re not forced to. But Debian is indeed way more conservative in that regard if you use their stable release. Particularly I think you won’t have issues with either regarding hardware compatibility or performance. But for what reason would you want Arch or Cachy OS if you don’t mind me asking?
Just so you know, if you install Distrobox you can run pretty much any app from any distro (except drivers), regardless if you choose Debian or Arch. So if I were you, I’d choose Debian if you’re worried about stability, and choose Arch/CachyOS if you want to keep up to date features and drivers. Then use Flatpak and Distrobox to download pretty much any app you want.
I particularly use CachyOS and have zero issues with it with my Asus Vivobook with a Ryzen 5825U released on 2023.
