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.
“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.