Unfortunately the one thing that will always keep me to Fedora is System76's disinterest in keeping the repositories somewhat up to date with the rest of the world. It boggles my mind why is there no Debian-based distro that are either bleeding edge or at the very least on par with Fedora's freshness in terms of updates.
There is Vanilla OS, which is based on Debian Sid, is immutable and rolling release.
As for freshness/pace of updates, it really is a matter of taste. Even though I've been using Debian stable in one form or another for nearly 25 years, and it's still my platform of choice for servers, when it comes to desktop, I find it hard to move away from ooensuse Tumbleweed, cause TW makes even Fedora feel old and stale.
Most of the bleeding edge stuff I want is in a Flatpack or Homebrew. It's definitely not ideal to have 3 separate ways to acquire software, but in practice I haven't run into many issues (Homebrew works surprisingly well on Linux!!)
I heard that too and am very excited for this! When I build my new machine with a new rdna4 machine, this'll be the distro/de I'll use at first bootup.
I'm not familiar with Rawhide so can't comment on that.
> Debian Unstable (also known by its codename "Sid") is not a release, but rather the development version of the Debian distribution containing the latest packages that have been introduced into Debian.
It's worth it reading the FAQ [0] before hopping on either, but as someone who's been running a mixed testing/unstable system for years, there's no reason for panic.
What I would love to see in the Debian ecosystem is a "Slowroll" release, similar to OpenSuse's upcoming "Slowroll" option. Maybe take Sid and make include any Sid packages that have been in it and stable for at least 2 weeks, and release an update every 30 days or so. Do some additional testing, backport any critical security fixes... sounds like a lot of work but it would be a valuable option.
That is mostly what testing does, modulo the exact numbers/durations involved.
One reason people don't do snapshot-releases of testing is that such releases wouldn't get security support. And security support shouldn't wait 30 days.
Which is why I explicitly mentioned security stuff being backported. Maybe it wasn't clear enough, but yes, I agree that security updates need to be released faster in many cases, and need a special handeling. The amount of work involved in handeling security patches is probably why it hasn't happened yet.
Wouldn't necessarily compare Sid to Rawhide, since for example, the Nvidia drivers on Sid are still on 535, while 550 has been released and is actually very good. Rawhide is almost analogous to Gentoo's unstable releases where whatever you are getting is probably being pulled directly from the source rather than a discrete release.
Whatever the Debian team calls their releases, you can pretty much slide it back a spot or two within the chain of release freshness relative to most other distros. It's almost impossible to accurately compare the totality of packages between distros and make any reasonable conclusion, but it's pretty safe to say that with the snapshot of limited software I have looked at that is reasonably meant to be updated such as userspace graphics libraries, Debian's stance on an unstable or testing distro does not align with the colloquial definition of such a thing.
Having packages land in that goldilocks zone of not cutting edge but not old either is particularly pertinent for multiplatform users. It can get annoying trying to keep everything pinned on macs and windows boxes to match distros that are slower to update.
I could totally see using something like Debian stable in a pure Linux environment with no newly-supported hardware being added, though.
I am currently running Cosmic in Fedora 40, dnf installed from a popular COPR (ryanabx/cosmic-epoch) and (*I*) have had no issues with an existing fedora install.
