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.
“If your computer can run the OS at installation, it’ll be able to run it for a long time.”
but what if I have a cheap laptop? Arch will force me to download the latest, and using xfce feels not enough.
You’re still in the mindset of Microsoft/Apple. “The latest” doesn’t mean software bloat. Hell, I just updated my packages last night, and the space they took up went down. Package updates typically bring improvements, and I’m always excited to see what optimizations they’ve added. Sometimes, major version changes (e.g. 5.4 to 6.0) bring big changes you might not want or need, but…
…nobody is forcing anything. You get to decide what gets upgraded and when. Arch/Debian isn’t some overarching company dictating when updates happen and what gets updated. It’s a community-driven project, mostly by hobbyists, and updates happen in a piecemeal fashion as individual package maintainers make improvements.
It sounds to me like you should try out both options in a VM. And if you’re planning on Debian, be sure to give PikaOS a try, too.
If latest release doesnt add bloat, what the software available is only the newest and bloated, for example the latest GIMP? What if you need older Photoshop version or something for ram or ssd?
You would run Windows software with Wine (Bottles is great for this). If you can find an older installer, you would (in theory) install it in a specific directory structured for Wine (called a wine prefix).
If software is too big or heavy, there’s ways to manually install a specific package version on Arch, or you can tell pacman not to upgrade a package you have already installed by noting it should be ignored via a specific section of your
pacman.confWith Arch partial upgrades are explicitly not supported. You either upgrade all packages to the current version or you upgrade nothing. With Debian that’s different, you can upgrade a single package (with its dependencies) just fine. Technically you can do whatever you want of course.
That said, I wouldn’t really worry about upgrades, even on old hardware. Choosing a desktop environment is much more impactful if you worry about performance.
I’m not sure what you mean. There’s a specific section in
/etc/pacman.conffor ignoring specific or group/meta packages. You absolutely can ignore specific packages and run a typicalpacman -Syuto update everything else just fine.ETA: and you can upgrade a single package with
pacman -Sy <package name>You can if you know what you’re doing, but you shouldn’t. In the context of this question holding back an Arch package is not a feature of Arch OP should rely on in every day use. In Debian this is supported (up to a point).
I would agree with that wisdom in general. I don’t think any package manager would prefer a user piecemeal updates like that.
I run arch on a 2007 laptop. It was a cheap laptop at the time. Still runs very fine. Unless you want to keep the laptop running for the next 40 years I wouldn’t worry too much.
Debian on a Lenovo t400 here.
I think I can see it, codes added to the latest release is unnoticeable, but are you forced to use the heaviest software? or are you able to choose the older ones?
If you install from repositores you are forced to use the latest version. You can use older versions through appimages. In general, there’s no real reason to use older versions unless you need to reproduce something specific which was done in the past doing it in the same way.
The beauty of Arch is you only have to install the software you actually want.