Depends whether you go with Tumbleweed, Slowroll, or Leap. I believe the Kernel Of The Day repository is only available for Tumbleweed. By 'latest' kernel you did mean bleeding edge nightly builds, right?
I want to have VMs that are kind of like Arch but a little bit more stable, yet have very latest versions of everything I need with minimal risk (no need for the bleeding edge at all times; Manjaro does this semi-okay with its two weeks grace period).
I don't need 100% of all software. Just a tiny fraction and they're modern tools that are heavily iterated on. Is it possible they have bugs? Very much so!
But "stay on an older version to be safe" is not the panacea many try to pretend that it is. Way too many bugs and security vulnerabilities on old versions as well.
If you’re on debian, there’s the backports repository, And stable means stable in terms of feature. They still patches for bugs and security, and quite fast for the latter.
You are getting too worked up about this, not to mention cherry-picking.
Debian Trixie, to my knowledge, comes with Linux kernel 6.12 LTS. Many people with more modern hardware want the most modern Linux kernel -- currently 6.18 -- to support their devices. There are also countless stabilization patches (I heard some of my acquaintances praising their Linux kernel upgrades as finally giving them access to all features of various Bluetooth periphery but did not ask for details).
Having a modern kernel is important. With Debian though, it's a friction.
Can it still be done? Sure, or at least I hope so as I want to repurpose my gaming machine as a remote worker / station and the only viable choice inside WSL2 is Debian. I do hope I can somehow make Debian install a 6.18 kernel.
Furthermore, you putting the word "need" in quotes implies non-determinism or even capriciousness -- those two cannot be further from the truth.
Arch and Fedora can't come to WSL2 soon enough.
...and none of that is even touching on the issue of much older versions of all software in there. I want the latest Neovim, for example. For objective developer experience reasons.
Debian stable is for purists or server admins. Not for users.
No. I just see the same person in this discussion making multiple posts saying "Fedora is modern, fedora is good, stable Debian is broken, old, and wrong".
Of course my reply is a little mechanical and biased because I'm refuting a strawman.
Suggesting that Debian's stable release is no good for users, when I'm sat here using it, and many many other people do so is crazy hyperbole!
Maybe you can show me that person and their claims so we can work with them?
Because I'm not that person.
Sure I said users and not programmers. Sue me.
I was criticizing Debian's model. I'll be getting Arch or a derivative on my main machine but for WSL2 (secondary machine that is for now stuck on Windows) I don't have much choice so I'll have to work with a distro where I'll have to actively work against how it normally operates. I'll handle it, but it doesn't need to be that way.
The following is a list of valid distributions that can be installed.
Install using 'wsl.exe --install <Distro>'.
NAME FRIENDLY NAME
Ubuntu Ubuntu
Ubuntu-24.04 Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
openSUSE-Tumbleweed openSUSE Tumbleweed
openSUSE-Leap-16.0 openSUSE Leap 16.0
SUSE-Linux-Enterprise-15-SP7 SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP7
SUSE-Linux-Enterprise-16.0 SUSE Linux Enterprise 16.0
kali-linux Kali Linux Rolling
Debian Debian GNU/Linux
AlmaLinux-8 AlmaLinux OS 8
AlmaLinux-9 AlmaLinux OS 9
AlmaLinux-Kitten-10 AlmaLinux OS Kitten 10
AlmaLinux-10 AlmaLinux OS 10
archlinux Arch Linux # Arch found here
FedoraLinux-43 Fedora Linux 43
FedoraLinux-42 Fedora Linux 42
eLxr eLxr 12.12.0.0 GNU/Linux
Ubuntu-20.04 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
Ubuntu-22.04 Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
OracleLinux_7_9 Oracle Linux 7.9
OracleLinux_8_10 Oracle Linux 8.10
OracleLinux_9_5 Oracle Linux 9.5
openSUSE-Leap-15.6 openSUSE Leap 15.6
SUSE-Linux-Enterprise-15-SP6 SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP6
Ontop of that I also use it as my main distro for WSL2 for a few months (before I used the unofficial one).
You don’t lose stable. It will only install the package you select and deps.
Also the terminal is the main interface for Linux and the BSDs. Why does having to learn it is a negative? A computer is not a toy. You don’t drive a truck with no training.
>You don’t lose stable. It will only install the package you select and deps.
We are fighting over definitions, but now you are no longer standard. Things will be broken. I know this, I've lived through this for years before I discovered up-to-date distros.
If download Fedora, I'm standard. Everything will work.
>Also the terminal is the main interface for Linux and the BSDs. Why does having to learn it is a negative? A computer is not a toy. You don’t drive a truck with no training.
Thats outdated. That is debian mindset. Fedora just works. No need to use the terminal, sure it works, but you can use the computer for a year without ever touching it.
I need to emphasize, you could. You just don't have a use. You are never sending random lines from a linux form to solve a problem. Why? Because it just works. Sure you might unblock some firewall ports so you can host a server, but you aren't doing surgery.
I cannot emphasize enough that Fedora works. It doesn't need fixing.
Or just understand that Debian stable can be moved to Debian testing (or even Debian unstable if even 2 weeks is too long) trivially. The best decision that Debian has ever made is not to distribute or advocate for testing as a rolling distribution, because if you're too ignorant to change your repo to testing, you're really too ignorant to be using testing.
Admitting that getting 6.18 on Debian is some sort of insurmountable mountain is not something I would do in public while trying to show off my expertise. I'm not running it, because I don't need a kernel that's been out for 5 minutes and offers me nothing that can't wait a month or two. I'm running what's current on testing, which is 6.17.13. It's about a minute of work to switch to testing. I run stable on all my servers, and testing on my laptops, it is a triviality. But to all you bleeding edge software people, it's somehow rocket surgery.
> Many people with more modern hardware want the most modern Linux kernel
To run the latest version of Progress Quest. Need biggest number available.
> Arch and Fedora can't come to WSL2 soon enough.
So, it's really still Windows, then. I assume you've moved from spending years ranting about how Linux people were purist server admins and Windows was for users and just worked, and now you've chosen the same posture after being pushed out of Windows.
> Debian stable is for purists or server admins. Not for users.
You're not a typical user. Most users want a functional computer, not the largest numbers they can find.
I'm really not sure what made you so rude but I'm not participating. You're intentionally misrepresenting because I didn't say even one thing of those you so criticize, yet have the gall to speak about showing something in public.
>Admitting that getting 6.18 on Debian is some sort of insurmountable mountain is not something I would do in public while trying to show off my expertise.
I genuinely don't care to show off expertise. I just want a distro that works.
Not an impressive feat then. We all had to make do with shoddy stuff just to get a project done (and I am not talking only in programming but also in meat-space). But to then hold on to it with a death grip, yeah, these people I don't respect.
Nobody is stoping anyone on putting a quick project up-and-running using Rust, let's say. But good luck finding people to maintain it in the long run. And good luck finding the "batteries included" stuff. And good luck on many other things. We're all building bazaars, not cathedrals, and that's ok, even though we oftentimes seem to forget that.
True, nobody is stopping anyone and that's why I am gradually moving my stuff from bash/zsh to Golang and might even further migrate it to Rust in the near future -- LLMs make these things almost trivial and my only hurdle was how verbose can Rust feel for a basic CLI app. That hurdle no longer exists.
But don't look at me, I never liked Perl, PHP, Ruby. They were, and still are, hacks. I was aiming at people who just accept the status quo and shrug.
The iMac Pro is a 2017 computer, although it was sold until 2021. So given that it runs Sequoia, that's anywhere from six to ten years of OS support. OCLP will probably figure out how to patch Tahoe for the iMac Pro soon enough, but until then, you can rejoice in the fact that you don't have to run Tahoe.
It could be worse -- at least you didn't spend tens of thousands on a 2019 model Intel Mac Pro in 2023. (Yes, they still sold them, and owners of those will be SOL in 2028. That's probably the worst OS support story in recent Apple history, and it's for some of their most expensive machines)
Actually you are correct. I've been following the HN threads about Tahoe and even watched a few YouTube videos and could only facepalm.
But then again I'll get rid of the iMac Pro this year. I'll have technicians butcher it and salvage whatever they can from it -- I suspect only the SSD will survive -- and will then tell them to hollow it out and put an R1811 board inside it so I can use it as a proper standalone 5K screen. I don't care about Macs anymore, they limit me too much and I can't maintain multiple Linux machines just when I figure I would want to do something that Macs can't do (like experiment with bcachefs or ZFS pools and volumes and snapshots for my continually evolving backup setup).
Fair. The screens are really beautiful, absolutely worth reusing if possible.
I'll be decommissioning 40+ 2020 27" iMacs this year (i9-9900, 32 GB) and it's such a shame to see so many great displays and otherwise functional and plenty fast computers become, essentially, e-waste.
I agree, it is a huge shame. And the R1811 boards are more or less 300 EUR (~360 USD). Not many companies would agree to spend $360 on a near-future e-waste, per device, just to be able to extract the high-quality display. True shame.
But I've learned my lesson. While Apple computer served me well from 2019 to 2026, macOS gets less and less usable for me and the bunch of things I want to be able to do on it only increases, and its appeal only decreases (not to mention the very justified OCD I get when I look at how much crap is running 24/7 on it!).
The iPhone stays, though I wonder for how long more. But the Mac will be on its way soon enough.
You would be correct but your "eventually will level out the playing field" is doing some super heavy lifting. This "eventually" might be 50 years from now and somebody's business might be under existential threat during any day between today and those 50 years in the future.
I can bet good money that most companies are not blowing $200 Claude Max subs on 24/7 scanning for vulns in their C code.
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There's the geopolitics angle that must be considered as well. We have countries that probe for leaks and vulns 24/7, and have done so for decades. Maybe let's stop framing this with the hugely unhelpful (and downright deceitful / objectively non-true) premise of "rewrites are fanboy projects" and "Rust zealots amirite lol" and move it to the much more accurate "we should do our best to not have the 4367th memory overflow CVE by removing the root cause" (hardware support & memory-safe languages). Because we have actual people out there who hate us and want to take everything away from us and then rule over us all and start disappearing the other-minded people during the cold of the night. Like they do in their own countries.
So yeah, maybe not all ideas for a rewrite are bad? Maybe not everything is spinning around our petty programmer quarrels? Maybe we should, you know, unite and start fighting the problems that poison us all? Who cares about C vs. Rust indeed. It was never about that in particular and it pisses me off seeing HN fight endlessly over it (I contributed quite a lot to that as well, though in the last months / year I more like started attacking those who immediately jump to blame Rust fans of irrational behaviour when it is nowhere to be found in the thread).
The true enemy here are the CVEs and anything and everything that can help adversaries take control of our stuff, extort us, ruin our infrastructure, destroy our way of life.
Maybe we should focus on that instead?
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FWIW, I gave up insisting rewriting stuff to people -- even after multiple extremely successful such campaigns that did save the owners money and led to much less alerts and entirely removed the notifications fatigue of the dev / ops teams. And I got generously paid for it. Still gave up. There's a weird animosity from the dev teams even when they seem to agree (or their CEO ordered them to agree) and it just left a bitter taste for me. And yes I could have wiped my tears with the banknotes and I kind of did but then there was also this weird strange tensions from executives as well, even if the operations were deemed a screaming success in terms of "all assigned objectives have been achieved and the promised financial savings materialized and even exceeded expectations".
I guess people just generally hate their boats being rocked even if is for their own good. Wish somebody managed to instill that wisdom in me some 30 years ago. Would have been hugely useful...
I am also gradually aging and that comes with the lack of desire to piss against the wind and to forever stop locking horns with people. To just be chill.
I am with you and fully agree with your "it does not have to be an all or nothing" stance. A remark on one part of your comment:
> What are you adding to the mix here? Your prompting skills?
The answer to that is an unironic and dead-serious "yes!".
My colleagues use Claude Opus and it does an okay job but misses important things occasionally. I've had one 18-hour session with it and fixed 3 serious but subtle and difficult to reproduce bugs. And fixed 6-7 flaky tests and our CI has been 100% green ever since.
Being a skilled operator is an actual billable skill IMO. And that will continue to be the case for a while unless the LLM companies manage to make another big leap.
I've personally witnessed Opus do world-class detective work. I even left it unattended and it churned away on a problem for almost 5h. But I spent an entire hour before that carefully telling it its success criteria, never to delete tests, never to relax requirements X & Y & Z, always to use this exact feedback loop when testing after it iterated on a fix, and a bunch of others.
In that ~5h session Opus fixed another extremely annoying bug and found mistakes in tests and corrected them after correcting the production code first and making new tests.
Opus can be scary good but you must not handwave anything away.
I found love for being an architect ever since I started using the newest generation [of scarily smart-looking] LLMs.
Yup, totally! I'm also not against the evolution of software engineer to a software architect. We were on that direction already anyway with the ever increasing amount of abstraction in our libraries and tools. This also frees up my ability to do other things, like coordinate cross team efforts, deal with customer support issues, etc. As a generalist, I feel more useful and thus valuable than ever, and that makes me very happy.
> unless the LLM companies manage to make another big leap.
Why is it a big leap? If the behavior you want can already be elicited by models just with the right level prompting, it's something that can be trained toward. As a simple mental model you could for instance imagine training a verifier-type model of Claude that given a problem spits out a prompt detailing "its success criteria, never to delete tests, never to relax requirements X & Y & Z, always to use this exact feedback loop when testing after it iterated on a fix, and a bunch of others." Also things like specific feedback loop or agentic harnesses will also end up being trained in, similar to how Claude is specifically trained for use with Claude Code.
Thinking of "prompt engineering" as a skill is a fools game, these are language models after all. Do you really think you will hold an advantage over them in your ability to phrase things?
> If the behavior you want can already be elicited by models just with the right level prompting
As mentioned upthread, it's not an all-or-nothing. "Just the right prompting" did get me farther than a few other people but I am very sure it's only a temporary advantage as you yourself alluded to (in a rather emotionally loaded way for reasons unknown).
LLMs can't do everything; they need a good feedback loop where they can ascertain if what they did works. There is a LOT of work out there that is not that (f.ex. game development, firmware / embedded work).
The LLM companies are already putting better feedback loops and agentic harnesses; even the upgrade from Opus 4.5 to 4.6 clearly demonstrated that to me. They don't want their GPUs to burn because people can't be bothered to think of an obvious edge case so they'll make the models smarter to compensate for deficiencies in the human operators.
> Do you really think you will hold an advantage over them in your ability to phrase things?
Regardless of your seeming snark the answer is yes, I do. But as said above, that's not going to last long. Who cares though, I make money in the meantime.
Well if none of the measures you already tried to stop that did not work, then maybe one thing that can help you is asking yourself whether you are not feeling drained after interacting with those people?
I, like yourself, cannot override my engineering mindset. I ALWAYS WANT TO HELP. But at one point I reframed it as an energy budget problem and how efficiently are my time and energy spent... and then it clicked.
I have learned to do that, but it actually makes me uncomfortable to do it.
I'm "on the spectrum," which, in my case, manifests as not being very comfortable, when people give me attention. That's why I like working on "infrastructure" stuff (and also why I used to be a bass player[0]).
Like with everything, none of the both extremes are good.
What helps me in situations where people talk about it for the umpteenth time is trying to drill down and find the root cause with carefully worded questions. I think I might be ready to become a therapist, lol. Though my fuse is quite short due to my own stress so I don't put myself in the "I am your emotional trash bin" kind of situations.
So to me even the situations you describe can be made use of. Think of it as a long-running background task with many steps; after each retry you get a new exception stack trace. F.ex. during conversation #7 you might understand one or two causes of the problem but at conversation #12 you might already have a nice root cause and you can then try to gently nudge the person towards addressing that.
Of course you are not mandated to. It's all about what you need in this current phase of life as well; you don't have to be people's therapist. It's just what I find super interesting the last year or so -- root-cause analysis of human problems.
But when I understand that somebody just wants to whine and be a constant victim, I mentally check out. Not worth the joules that my brain would spend on that person.
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