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.

  • jorigicoku@lemmy.world
    41·
    9 hours ago

    With 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.

    • Telorand@reddthat.com
      1·
      6 hours ago

      I’m not sure what you mean. There’s a specific section in /etc/pacman.conf for ignoring specific or group/meta packages. You absolutely can ignore specific packages and run a typical pacman -Syu to update everything else just fine.

      ETA: and you can upgrade a single package with pacman -Sy <package name>

      • jorigicoku@lemmy.world
        1·
        4 hours ago

        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).

        • Telorand@reddthat.com
          1·
          2 hours ago

          I would agree with that wisdom in general. I don’t think any package manager would prefer a user piecemeal updates like that.