I've never lost a weekend to a Debian dist-upgrade. Just read the release notes carefully beforehand, take a full backup of your data (which you should be doing anyway), make a note of any non-Debian applications you're using on that machine (that's the stuff that will need the most extensive testing post-upgrade) and it should simply work.
I have. debian, raspbian, ubuntu. A few times it has gone well, only to find there was cruft left over from previous installs.
"it should simply work" is not a given on any linux.
I'm not denigrating those distributions, there are lots of reasons to have a stable release without a lot of things changing (especially development).
It's just that changing lots of assumptions at once is fragile.
I used Arch on a server once (still running) but found the experience on Debian was more to my taste, and somehow never liked pacman. Maybe it's time to take another look. I never tried it on the desktop.
Re:MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?
by sergeykish on Friday May 22, 2020 @03:15PM
(#23275810)
Interesting, I have opposite experience. Pacman looks so much simpler than aptitude, apt-get, apt-cache, dpkg. And makepkg - it just works. I have not managed to create packages on Ubuntu.
No outdated packages, no ppa. No upgrade. Install is rough but it nails how simple the system is.
Ubuntu is a good starting point. But there is so much more.
I agree about makepkg / PKGBUILD -- I've casually made packages.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PKGBUILD
For debian/ubuntu it is not as straightforward.
It is lightweight, since you choose everything that is installed, sort of opt-in.
It has all the latest software.
It has "rolling releases" which means there is never a giant lost-weekend distribution upgrade.
It has the AUR (arch user repository) for just about any software ever.