How "out of date" is Debian really?

For a server? I want it out of date, so long as "out of date" means "older versions with backported security patches".

I'm boring and don't care about the new whizzy crap, because if it's working now and it's secure, I'm not touching it. There is no feature you can offer me that will make me want to update a stable working server, so don't screw with what version of software I'm running.

For desktop use? Give me KDE Plasma 6.2 right now, not three years from now. I need that new shit in my veins, so hurry the hell up.

So I mostly use Debian stable on anything server-y, and Fedora on anything desktop-y.

And, I posted this just a few days ago, but I don't like, at all, going outside of distro repos on Debian for packages.

You end up with dependency chain issues in dpkg/apt, because dpkg is super hyper prone to them anyways, and have installs you can't easily just update or upgrade because it can't figure out what in the hell you've done to it.

So I just uh, don't use 3rd party repos for updated versions of things unless it's utterly critical to do so and/or accept that at some point I'm doing a clean install for a migration because shit will be so broken you can't pull it to the current stable version because of the 3rd party software.

If you’re a software developer or an enthusiast, you’ll notice it immediately. You’ve been reading and hearing about the new release of the BestThingEver 3.14, and you’re totally hyped up about it. You rush to install BTE to experience how awesome it is only to find out that the Debian repos still have a BTE 2.0.5 and none of the cool new features everyone has been talking about for the last 6 months.

Oh, that didn’t sound familiar? If you can’t tell the difference between two versions of a particular application, Debian will be perfectly fine for you.

As a someone who has used both Arch, and Debian, neither has less or more bugs.

Debian has the same bugs, over the period of their stable release, and Arch has changing bugs (like a new set every update lol).

Yes, Arch is going to get a lot more features. But it comes at the cost of "instability". Which is not so much a lack of reliability but instead, how much the software changes. I remember a firefox bug that caused a crash when I attempt to drag bookmarks in my bookmarks bar around, which lasted for like a week — then it went away.

The idea behind projects like Debian, is that for an entity that needs stability, you can simply work around the bugs, since you always know what and where they are. (Well, the actual intent is that entities write patches and submit them to Debian to fix the bugs but no one does that).

Another thing: Debian Stable has more up to date packages than Ubuntu 20.04, and Ubuntu 22.04. This happens because Ubuntu "freezes" a Sid version, and those packages don't get major updates for a while. So often, the latest Debian stable has newer packages than the older Ubuntu releases.

Debian ships a new release every 2 years.

You can use flatpak to get the latest apps. If you need the latest CLI software use containers. The entire point of Debian is to have a solid base system to build off of.

@JackbyDev The "Out of date" is good for a server, as long as security patches are backported (debian does this). Out of date is not good for a desktop. I want to get the new releases of the Window Manager, office suite, browser, etc.

Debian 13 has 69% of packages up to date: https://repology.org/repositories/statistics Years ago I used Mint and was annoyed by the outdated packages, so I used the nix package manager. But after a few Months I switched completely to nixos.

the more software you install, that is not in the standard repo, the more unstable it will become...

i use a rolling release distro on my desktop, void btw.
on servers i use debian, because i want the software as reliable as possible. i don't care if the packages are older as long as no update breaks the system...

This is always a spectrum from how long it was since the last Debian stable release. So about 2 years max.

Modern release cadences make it crazy anywhere but Debian, but security patches are very timely. If you're dealing with newer features, driver support or java/npm packages you're probably also outside the typical defaults, but there's generally some people working to keep the common ones up to date.

Still not my preferred way to handle updates and in some cases... kind of abusive to the maintainers who constantly haVE to deal with bug reports from "out of date" Debian users. The xscreensaver maintainer has some choice words. But it works, has for years with no sign of slowing.

I’ve used Debian stable daily for 20 years.

When I was young and passionate about Linux there were lots of things that were behind and noticible. Notably big things like KDE with obvious graphical features that I could see I was missing out on.

After a few years I stop finding any excitement in upgrading at all. I became critical of pointless features and rewrites. KDE is worse if anything.

In the last 5 years there has been stuff I’ve wanted that’s existed outside the project. Docker when it came out, Wireguard. I just ended up waiting.

The only software I run outside the repositories atm is neovim and that’s because I want to use the latest Scala-metals IDE tool. That itself is becoming more stable though.

I've had hard drives be too new for the Debian kernel. Granted it was a VERY fancy hard drive, but... Ever since that I've been leaning Fedora, but Fedora 40 is awful, so I'm considering trying Debian as my preferred distro again in the future.

It's easy to backport newer software to Debian stable: https://wiki.debian.org/SimpleBackportCreation#Install_Debian_packaging_tools

I had to do this with transmission-daemon when the stable version had a nasty memory leak. I use Debian on all my secondary computers, the ones where I don't need the newest software and don't want to fuck with it and have it break.

Debian is on a roughly 2 year release cycle, and typically has a 6 month (-ish) freeze leading up to the release. So software in the stable release will generally be somewhere between 6 months and 2 years out of date. (My math might be a bit off but hopefully you get the idea).

Ultimately, it comes down to how you use your system, and what you need/want from your software. What you consider to be "the things that matter" will really be the deciding factor here. Need the occasional newer version of an application or library? It's probably fine. Need the latest, greatest desktop environment? You may want to pass.

There are a number of ways to install newer versions. Backports, if it has what you want, is the easiest and safest.

There are other ways as well, but depending on what method you choose and what software it is, you may need to be careful not to break something. (I'd recommend not adding random third-party deb repositories for this reason).

Flatpak seems reasonable, but I haven't used it much (once or twice I think). I typically use backports, or occasionally do my own local backports from sid.

Snap and AppImage are also possibilities. I don't use snap, and I think I installed something proprietary by AppImage exactly once.

If it's not in Debian at all, then I need to handle that a bit differently. But to me that's a different issue than the 'old version' issue that Debian is often derided for.

Anecdotally, I've been daily-driving Debian stable (including for gaming) for over 20 years, and it suits my needs well. But of course, YMMV.

Depends on what you do.

If you're just browsing, and doing casual stuff, it's not really noticeable. It's perfect for the less technically oriented because nothing changes for years.

I've been using MX for about a year now, but I definitely wouldn't have without flatpak and nix. I need packages that aren't years out of date, so they're all installed through nix home-manager.

The benefit of this combo is that while user packages might break, the system itself will be predictable for the next few years. That means no new bugs, but also that minor issues won't be solved.

Yeah it's pretty out of date. You might then "eh that doesn't matter, I like things to be stable and I'll just imagine I'm three years in the past".

That works until some software introduces a bug fix or a new feature that you really need and you can't use it because of your distro's weird update policies.

You will very quickly find that you don't care anywhere near as much about theoretical stability as you do about a concrete feature or bugfix that is available but inaccessible.

I say theoretical because in practice Debian stable isn't really much more stable than more up-to-date distros. It just has fewer new bugs and more old bugs.

They might try to claim they backport fixes for the old bugs, but in reality they don't have the manpower to do that for 100k packages or whatever it is. They do it for critical bugs of very important packages but that's it.

i couldn't install a minecraft server because java in the repos was too old.

Yes, there are ways to install newer versions in a way that shouldn't cause any issues (as opposed to adding a bunch of unstable repos): Flatpak.

IMO Flatpak has made Debian a lot more usable. You get the stability of the Debian base system but can have newer apps if you want to, without unnecessarily complicating matters with PPA repositories that seemingly always fuck up.

If you want the bleeding edge go Sid.

I've been on debian stable for quite a while, it hasn't been an issue yet.

If it's something that needs to stay updated I use flatpaks which are usually available nowadays.

I typically just build from source anything that I absolutely need a newer release of.

Years ago I tried running Debian on my desktop computer and it became very quickly apparent it was not suited to my needs because of the out-of-date software. These days I only really consider rolling release distros for my desktop, or at least something with a fairly snappy release schedule. If I went for Debian, I'd probably run sid or testing.

Now, in situations where the bleeding edge is not necessary, Debian is fantastic. I've run it on my laptop, Raspberry Pi server and PinePhone. On the laptop, having a solid base that doesn't break if I don't use it for a while was great, since I didn't use that laptop often. I did use flatpaks for some applications that I really wanted to be more recent and it worked nicely. So yes, you can use Debian as a solid base and use Flatpaks/Appimages/other to run apps you really need the newest version of, where available of course.

What do you mean by "out of date" exactly?