How to have a boring and low-maintenance system?
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So, you are saying Debian is the better choice, right?
Ubuntu comes with non-free drivers which can make it easier to set up and use. I use Debian on my server and Ubuntu on my laptops.
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Doesn't ucore also have to restart to apply updates?
Not super ideal for a server as far as maintenance and uptime to have unexpected, frequent restarts as opposed to in-place updates, unless one's startup is completely automated and drives are on-device keyfile decrypted, but that probably fits some threat models for security.
The desktop versions are great!
Run k3s on top and run your stateless services on a lightweight kubernetes, then you won’t care you have to reboot your hosts to apply updates?
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I had problems with waking from sleep/hibernate, audio issues (total dropouts as well as distortion in screen-recording apps), choppy video playback and refusal to enter fullscreen, wonky cursor scaling, apps not working as expected or not running at all. I've managed to fix most of these or find temporary workarounds (grateful for flatpaks for once!) or alternative applications. But the experience was not fun, particularly as there was only a 2 week return window for the laptop and I needed to be sure the problems weren't hardware design/choice related. And I'm finding it 50/50 whether an app actually works when I install it from the repo. There's a lot less documentation for manually installing things as well and DNF is slow compared to apt...
I don't want to say for certain that Fedora as a distro is to blame but I suspect that it is. I miss my Debian days.
(grateful for flatpaks for once!)
That's how I run my system right now. Fedora KDE + pretty much everything as Flatpak.
Gives me a recent enough kernel and KDE version so I don't have to worry when I get new hardware or new features drop but also restricts major updates to new Fedora versions so I can hold those back for a few weeks.
I made a similar switch as you but from Ubuntu to Fedora because of outdated firmware and kernel.
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Those who don't have the time or appetite to tweak/modify/troubleshoot their computers: What is your setup for a reliable and low-maintenance system?
Context:
I switched to Linux a couple of years ago (Debian 11/12). It took me a little while to learn new software and get things set up how I wanted, which I did and was fine.
I've had to replace my laptop though and install a distro (Fedora 41) with a newer kernel to make it work but even so, have had to fix a number of issues. This has also coincided with me having a lot less free time and being less interested in crafting my system and more interested in using it efficiently for tasks and creativity. I believe Debian 13 will have a new enough kernel to support my hardware out of the box and although it will still be a hassle for me to reinstall my OS again, I like the idea of getting it over with, starting again with something thoroughly tested and then not having to touch anything for a couple of years. I don't need the latest software at all times.
I know there are others here who have similar priorities, whether due to time constraints, age etc.
Do you have any other recommendations?
You simply don't do any maintenance whatsoever.
t. Got a arch linux install that I (rarely) perform "sudo pacman -Syu --noconfirm" and it works like a champ.
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This really is the answer. The more services you add, the more of your attention they will require. Granted, for most services already integrated into the distro’s repo, the added admin overhead will likely be minimal, but it can add up. That’s not to say the admin overhead can’t be addressed. That’s why scripting and crons, among some other utilities, exist!
i think its more about modifying the system behavior, esp on desktop oses. i have many local services running on my server, and if set up right, its almost no maintenance.
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Ubuntu. It's boring but it all works.
I am currently using an recent version of Ubuntu live USB for backups and a "serious" error window pops up every time I boot it. Same experience with Ubuntu installations. For me at least, Ubuntu isn't anything close to stable.
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Get a big mainstream distro and stop tinkering with it.
i want to try another distro than ubuntu, but the damn thing isnt giving me a single excuse to format my system. it doesnt break if you don't fuck with it.
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I’ve been distro hopping for decades. I got exhausted with things constantly breaking. I’ve been using mint for the past six months with zero issues. It’s so refreshing that everything just works.
Same here. I got to a point I wanted to use the OS rather than play with and fix it. Went back to Mint and stayed there.
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You simply don't do any maintenance whatsoever.
t. Got a arch linux install that I (rarely) perform "sudo pacman -Syu --noconfirm" and it works like a champ.
I used to lose my keys all the time. I got so sick and tired of losing my keys, nowadays I mostly just leave them in the front door, I only occasionally lock it and it works like a champ.
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If you have battery drain, make sure you’ve disabled the option to regularly wake up and do some background processing (check for emails, sync photos, etc.). Settings → Battery → Options… → Wake for network access. (Or search for “Power Nap” in the System Sertings dialog.)
No need to use
pmsetfor that.So here's the thing - if you can think of it, I've already tried it
I spent a week and a half sifting through countless forum posts on Apple's own support center, Macrumors, reddit, and a host of other forums.The "Wake for network access" setting was the first thing I disabled after I wiped and reinstalled the OS. Among a number of other settings. Still got the fucking "EC.DarkPME (Maintenance)" process firing off every 45 seconds, no matter what I did, causing excessive insomnia and draining the battery within 12 hours.
What I ended up doing was using a little tool called "FluTooth" to automatically disable wifi/Bluetooth on sleep (the built-in OS settings did fuck-all), set
hibernationmodeto 25, and a few other tweaks withpmsetthat currently escape me.I put a solid 7 full charge cycles on the brand new battery before it finally calmed the fuck down.
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I used to lose my keys all the time. I got so sick and tired of losing my keys, nowadays I mostly just leave them in the front door, I only occasionally lock it and it works like a champ.
Comparing a PC maintenance to leaving the keys outside the front door is too dramatic, to not say the least...
...unless you work at NASA and/or your PC is holding something too valuable/sensitive/high-priority for others to want to hack it "that badly" -- which I (highly) doubt it.
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I had problems with waking from sleep/hibernate, audio issues (total dropouts as well as distortion in screen-recording apps), choppy video playback and refusal to enter fullscreen, wonky cursor scaling, apps not working as expected or not running at all. I've managed to fix most of these or find temporary workarounds (grateful for flatpaks for once!) or alternative applications. But the experience was not fun, particularly as there was only a 2 week return window for the laptop and I needed to be sure the problems weren't hardware design/choice related. And I'm finding it 50/50 whether an app actually works when I install it from the repo. There's a lot less documentation for manually installing things as well and DNF is slow compared to apt...
I don't want to say for certain that Fedora as a distro is to blame but I suspect that it is. I miss my Debian days.
I had problems with waking from sleep/hibernate
what graphics do you have? Don't expect that to go away with nvidia. no such issues on AMD though, intel should be fine though
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I had problems with waking from sleep/hibernate, audio issues (total dropouts as well as distortion in screen-recording apps), choppy video playback and refusal to enter fullscreen, wonky cursor scaling, apps not working as expected or not running at all. I've managed to fix most of these or find temporary workarounds (grateful for flatpaks for once!) or alternative applications. But the experience was not fun, particularly as there was only a 2 week return window for the laptop and I needed to be sure the problems weren't hardware design/choice related. And I'm finding it 50/50 whether an app actually works when I install it from the repo. There's a lot less documentation for manually installing things as well and DNF is slow compared to apt...
I don't want to say for certain that Fedora as a distro is to blame but I suspect that it is. I miss my Debian days.
Let's hope Debian fits you. I had to change to an Intel WiFi card but everything else worked OOTB for me on my laptop
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Not super ideal for a server as far as maintenance and uptime to have unexpected, frequent restarts
This is such a weird take given that 99.9% of people here are just running this on their home servers which aren't dictated by a SLA.
But also as these items are based on Fedora Silverblue, you can just use the
--apply-liveflag when updating to not have to reboot for anything but the kernel as usual.That is very fair!!
But on the other hand, 99.9% of users don't read all of the change notes for their packages and don't have notifications for CVEs. In that case, in my opinion just doing updates as they come would be easier and safer.
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You simply don't do any maintenance whatsoever.
t. Got a arch linux install that I (rarely) perform "sudo pacman -Syu --noconfirm" and it works like a champ.
Same with fedora. Just run the upgrade once in a while and it work.
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Those who don't have the time or appetite to tweak/modify/troubleshoot their computers: What is your setup for a reliable and low-maintenance system?
Context:
I switched to Linux a couple of years ago (Debian 11/12). It took me a little while to learn new software and get things set up how I wanted, which I did and was fine.
I've had to replace my laptop though and install a distro (Fedora 41) with a newer kernel to make it work but even so, have had to fix a number of issues. This has also coincided with me having a lot less free time and being less interested in crafting my system and more interested in using it efficiently for tasks and creativity. I believe Debian 13 will have a new enough kernel to support my hardware out of the box and although it will still be a hassle for me to reinstall my OS again, I like the idea of getting it over with, starting again with something thoroughly tested and then not having to touch anything for a couple of years. I don't need the latest software at all times.
I know there are others here who have similar priorities, whether due to time constraints, age etc.
Do you have any other recommendations?
- yet another vote for Debian Stable
- second the comment on: if you need a newer kernel for hardware reasons, use backports
- Xfce
- stick to flatpaks when dealing with wanting to try out a new program (if you like it, then make the decision to use apt or not)
- don’t confuse “hasn’t been updated” with “hasn’t needed to be updated”
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I've been running Manjaro for the last 4 months and it's been incredibly reliable and smooth. I haven't done any serious tweaking beyond installing a realtime audio kernal. I run updates every few days and I haven't had a single issue so far.
Are you using the liquorix kernel?
I can only see one downvote and four upvotes from here - I think you're good!
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Comparing a PC maintenance to leaving the keys outside the front door is too dramatic, to not say the least...
...unless you work at NASA and/or your PC is holding something too valuable/sensitive/high-priority for others to want to hack it "that badly" -- which I (highly) doubt it.
No it is
https://www.pandasecurity.com/en/mediacenter/consequences-not-applying-patches/
And:
You're allowing for more attack vectors that would not be there if the system were to be patched. Depending on the severity of the vulnerability, this can result in something like crashes or something as bad as remote code execution, which means attackers can essentially do whatever they want with the pwned machine, such as dropping malware and such. If you wanna try this in action, just spin up a old EOL Windows machine and throw a bunch of metasploit payloads at it and see what you can get.
While nothing sensitive may be going to or on the machine (which may seem to be the case but rarely is the case), this acts as an initial foothold in your environment and can be used as a jumpbox of sorts for the attacker to enumerate the rest of your network.
And:
Not having vulnerability fixes that are already public. Once a patch/update is released, it inherently exposes to a wider audience that a vulnerability exists (assuming we’re only talking about security updates). That then sets a target on all devices running that software that they are vulnerable until updated.
There’s a reason after windows Patch Tuesday there is Exploit Wednesday.
Yes, a computer with vulnerabilities can allow access to others on the network. That’s what it means to step through a network. If computer A is compromised, computer B doesn’t know that so it will still have the same permissions as pre-compromise. If computer A was allowed admin access to computer B, now there are 2 compromised computers.
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No it is
https://www.pandasecurity.com/en/mediacenter/consequences-not-applying-patches/
And:
You're allowing for more attack vectors that would not be there if the system were to be patched. Depending on the severity of the vulnerability, this can result in something like crashes or something as bad as remote code execution, which means attackers can essentially do whatever they want with the pwned machine, such as dropping malware and such. If you wanna try this in action, just spin up a old EOL Windows machine and throw a bunch of metasploit payloads at it and see what you can get.
While nothing sensitive may be going to or on the machine (which may seem to be the case but rarely is the case), this acts as an initial foothold in your environment and can be used as a jumpbox of sorts for the attacker to enumerate the rest of your network.
And:
Not having vulnerability fixes that are already public. Once a patch/update is released, it inherently exposes to a wider audience that a vulnerability exists (assuming we’re only talking about security updates). That then sets a target on all devices running that software that they are vulnerable until updated.
There’s a reason after windows Patch Tuesday there is Exploit Wednesday.
Yes, a computer with vulnerabilities can allow access to others on the network. That’s what it means to step through a network. If computer A is compromised, computer B doesn’t know that so it will still have the same permissions as pre-compromise. If computer A was allowed admin access to computer B, now there are 2 compromised computers.
Nice cherry picking/moving the goalpost, but that is not how refuting works. A PC at NASA has a much higher "threat level" than my Orange pi zero 3, just chilling on the background. Which means, a potential "security hole" may prove harmful for these pcs... but it'll definitely not hurt me in the slightest.
And before you parrot with other links and/or excuses... yes, I'm not negating their existence. I'm just saying they are there... but, well... "who cares"? If anything, its much faster to set up my distro back up "just like never happened before" than performing any "maintenance" whatsoever. Again, "Common sense antivirus" reigns supreme here -- know what you are doing, and none of these things will matter.
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I had problems with waking from sleep/hibernate
what graphics do you have? Don't expect that to go away with nvidia. no such issues on AMD though, intel should be fine though
Intel Arc integrated graphics.
