Say the latest version of Wine, GZdoom, VI, Java compiler, Rust, etc etc etc. I am a fond user of VMware Workstation. And Spotify. etc.

(I do hope the repos contain all these software?).

I don't know, it's your machine, what does the search function of your package manager tell you?

I don't know about this GZdoom, but everything else that you said is a non event. Also don't know what linux users do with spotify. Do a search on LQ for that. I've seen that talked about before.

I will abandon Ubuntu and install "Debian Stable" instead. I need to check that repo to see which software is included. The latest GZDoom has some new hot graphics I want to try. Maybe it is better that I create a Windows VM to separate Spotify and other software, so that "Debian Stable" does not become unstable.

If you mix lots of bloatware in the windows machine you will have bad surprises too.
Critical professional software needs always a more controlled IT environment/system to run safely. That's a rule for any IT system.
You can't install "anything" in a system without fear. Don't forget what "malware" is, or security holes. As an administrator you can do almost anything you want, even things that are dangerous for the stability and security of your system. This means that you have to be always careful otherwise no o.s. or antivirus s/w can save your system.

The more fancy and "easy to use" or "easy to administrate" the system, the more vulnerable is, for me. And I think it is true for security as well as for stability. "Robust" systems are usually more restrictive and less fancy. Critical systems are always restrictive. A server that has to work 24/7 for months or a production workstation can be a critical system for the business. A desktop computer that someone uses at home for news surfing, youtube and facebook isn't really that critical from an admin's or developer's point of view.


Those software categories belong to very specific/scientific software, out of the "general" user's software like the remaining. So, let me share my experience on this domain.
Most of the times, the developer tries to get the best for the calculations to be performed (usually a very big computational load), to solve the problem within the available RAM, to shrink as much as possible the execution time that can be from hours to days, etc. Factors like running under every o.s. version or any distro etc are often left behind. Very often, older language versions and/or libraries are used because they are already available and well tested. Hardware requirements can be very different than, say, a game.

My company bought an expensive commercial software (domain of the marine engineering), and we had to make decisions on the hardware specification. I did suggest that we need to know if the software makes use of a performant graphics card for the calculations. The man from the vendor/support confirmed (orally) that it makes use of the graphics card, and then my company bought a mswindows machine 32GB RAM, Xeon (or perhaps i9) 16 thread (=8 core) with a very expensive graphics adapter. However, running times seemed to be very long. I did inspect the system's activity and found: RAM at less than 50%, CPU at 115% for all cores, GPU activity zero! This meant that the software didn't use the graphics adapter, at least for its principal heavy task, and lots of money went to an unnecessary device instead of, say, another faster CPU! and that "support" staff was non competent at all.
By the way, looking in the user's forum I found many users that confirmed that the software was running faster under linux than under windows (it was originally a Unix software around 1990-92, at the time there was no windows, no linux, just unix or vms for serious applications).

Very often developers specify the linux distributions and versions that they did test with their software. It seems that distributions like Red Hat Enterprise or Suse or CentOS are well respected. Nevertheless I found forum reports about finite element computational software running under Ubuntu too. You can try to get info from the developers or users of those s/w packages on specific o.s. requirements/details.

To summarize, I think it would be safer to not "mix" heavy computational software with internet, gaming and multimedia user's software. Perhaps 2 separate VMs with separate OSs (or 2 separate computers) could solve the issue.

I install lot of sane stuff in Windows, and have no instability problems. Sure, the software might not work, or work badly, but Windows does not break. Sure, if you install 100s of cracked games and shit, you will have bad surprises. But if you only install legit software spotify, virtualbox, vmware workstation, AAA games like Witcher3 or Alien Isolation, Word, Excel, programming IDEs, open sourced GZdoom, etc - then you have no stability problems at all with Windows. I never had actually. I have friends with their Windows full of virus and malware and advertising shit and it takes ages to boot, but I am careful to only install legit software. Same with Solaris, the problem with Solaris can be that the software might not work, but Solaris never gets unstable. And updates for Solaris and Windows works fine. I suspect all this also applies to Mac OS X.

It seems that Linux has a different philosophy than other OSes. You need to be very careful with what you install, or you will have stability problems. My observation is that with other OSes, the software might not work, but the OS never gets unstable. With Linux, if you install the wrong software, the OS might get unstable. I need to learn the Linux rules.

You gotta be joking...

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Your goals are at odds with each other. You want a stable system (or do you?*) and you also want the latest versions of software.

Debian stable may not be for you. As I see it you want the best of both worlds - the newest applications and a stable system. So what you're suggesting is stable + backports and as other have hinted, those backports will be very much your responsibility to compile and maintain where they don't already exist.

*Your definition of stable is also at odds with the real definition of stable, in terms of software. A "stable" platform is simply unchanging or changes little and stays that way for a fixed period until there is a new release - an unstable platform is dynamic and changes constantly. It has nothing to do with the "stability" in terms of bugs, etc. A stable platform can have bugs, which have been fixed in a newer "unstable" platform.

Where the software you want is a) not in the distribution's repositories and b) only available in binary form (proprietary) you are taking a gamble with software which was not built against your target platform - as a rule most Debian packages of this sort are built against a particular 'buntu release. There is no guarantees it will be binary compatible with a given Debian release, nor with any future releases of the distribution it was built on.

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Couldn't disagree more. Been running Linux as my main OS for over 20yrs on countless machines and have been running Ubuntu on at least one of them since the 5.04 (the first one) and very rarely have issues. Even IF something catastrophic happened, assuming /home is partitioned separately like it should be even if the system needed to be reinstalled all of your personal stuff and config files would survive and you'd just need to put the software back in. All your setups, tweaks, and even desktop wallpaper would still be set at the first boot.

Just forget about it, folks.
I wrote it before:

Haha, you are absolutely correct in pointing this out!

Yes, my bad. I did not meant "stable distro", I meant "stability". So, what I want is a "robust OS which has stability". I want a robust OS where I can install whatever (sane) software I want to, without the OS freaking out or break things causing a reinstall. I want my OS to not break or stop working, as soon as I install the latest GZdoom, Spotify, VMware Workstation, Rust, etc. Of course, if I install malware, virus and cracked games and porn surf, then the OS might have problems - but I dont do that. I am a careful user. Say I want to install, LaTeX, or Skype, or VMWare, or whatever - then I want to be able to do that.

On Windows10 I can install Diablo3, Red Dead Redemption2, Witcher 3, etc - and my install does not stop working. I do not want to only run the old games that MS certified ages ago. I want to run the latest games. Mac OS X also allows you to install the latest games without freaking out - I suspect?

So, please tell me, how can I achieve this? I want a robust Linux installation where I can install any sane new software I want to, and not be forced to run old software only in the repo?

If many people can have a robust Linux without problems, then maybe my hardware is problematic? For instance, I could not install Ubuntu 18.04, 18.10, etc because it would lag too much. I got maybe 1-2 fps in the desktop. I wonder if there were some Intel Spectre or Meltdown patch that my hardware did not like? So I had to stay on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS until it stopped working. One update broke it, and I could not rollback. Then I tried Ubuntu 2020.04 LTS which also was problematic. Now I am on 2020.10 and it works this far. I have not dared to accept any updates at all, though. I am afraid it will break my install, and then I have to reinstall everything again. I am fed up with this constant maintaining and sometimes reinstalling everything. I have a supermicro X10SAT motherboard, it has always had some problems with OSes, because it has a builtin firewire? Or the chipset is C226, maybe it is very odd? I dont know, but I am fed up with all these problems. I just want a working robust Linux environment which does not break every year. I dont have time to fix all problems.

Blog is dated 2019 while comments 2018, no matter it is at least one year old. Seems reaching compatibility along different OS'es is long term task. Perhaps it will never happens. I guess it depends on how much interest is in zfs in Linux community. Last time I tried Red Hat based distro xfs was default. By the way I removed it - it constantly signaled my hardware is broken.

I don't know how much it is correct. For rolling-release distributions there are every day updates. New release are just mass update. Say per six months period. Each such release is considered to be stable. So picture is more complex - system is changing between stable releases.

Just ask those who create these games for Linux version. So far Diablo 3 is not open source. So we can't port it on Linux.

Edit: I mean native Linux version - not Windows version running on wine.

You'll see that it was updated in 2019, hence why comments seem older than the article. It's still relevant however. (note that the OP of this thread also commented there.)

The entire premise of this thread is wrong. OpenZFS is the accepted industry wide implementation of ZFS. Oracle ZFS is closed, proprietary implementation which is incompatible with the former - from that corporation, who only have MS and SCO as rivals in their efforts to kill FOSS - and who killed OpenSolaris.

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