I remember the days when people justified Google Chrome's maximalist RAM usage by saying it was a good thing because it was allocating what the program actually needed to run quickly and efficiently, and it was better to grab what it actually needed then to operate inefficiently while using fewer system resources.
For a while that was even the majority view, but it never quite made sense to me.
When I plug a Bitlocker encrypted drive from another computer to linux, put a bad password 3 times and then plug it into W11 24H2 on my HP 800 G1 the drive decrypts itself! What? It's a third laptop drive.
Nowadays the non-free-firmware repo is active by default, so the normal official debian image actually works.
It used to be the case that the normal download from the homepage was often useless because it didn't support most networking hardware, but this is no longer the case now.
Debian packages are ancient, unless you use "testing", which will be broken. That being said, Ubuntu is horrible too. The problem comes when you have to use proprietary software made by incompetent vendors, and that only works in Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is basically a packages imported/synced from debian (I think they mostly cherry pick unstable) + ubuntu specific stuff.
Debian Testing is pretty much what many Debian users use on a daily basis. They pretty much invented the notion of rolling releases. Debian stable is of course not cut that often. Ubuntu has a higher frequency of updates. But still, their LTS releases are spaced two years apart. 26.10 follows the recent LTS 26.04 release, so that gives them a good 1.5 years to work on stabilizing this. I've been using Ubuntu server LTS releases for the last ten years or so with generally no major issues. There are always some minor headaches between updates but generally nothing that worries me.
The main criticism here seems to be that these packages need a bit more work or are still lacking certain important features. Getting them out in a non LTS release like this is how they get packages to be ready for LTS releases. If you need LTS now, 26.04 is what you should be using. By 28.04, this should be rock solid.
For me what's risky here is deviating from what other distros are doing. Including Debian. Ubuntu has a history of being opinionated not everything they push through being adopted with great enthusiasm (e.g. Snap). You could make the point here that waiting for Debian to pick this up would be nicer. But you could also make the point that waiting for that is a very slow process.
ever used backports? no need to go to sid. Flatpack/Appimage/Compile from source for the rest (on my debian machine it's just kicad that is not installed from APT, well and the couple of softwares that don't do deb)
Firmwares, that's another story, i have fedora on the laptop for that.
> The problem comes when you have to use proprietary software made by incompetent vendors, and that only works in Ubuntu
If i want to do FPGA development, either ubuntu or a distro old enough to package JDK 11 (sigh) and X. not XWayland. Debian 11 was the last one to have JDK 11 i think (talk about ancient..)
Needless to say FPGA is done on the windows machine these days.
So apparently zamadatix's point wasn't well taken, but I think it could be an effective approach to store the same data twice over to increase the likelihood of successful recovery. Could be even be even ten times, or e.g. 6+4 with redundant recovery coding.
Although you do have a point that the compressed data might be more difficult to decipher, if it doesn't have sufficient redundancy to skip bad parts, or if it is essential that the data is aligned in a certain way (e.g. disk images, and probably many other formats) and the format doesn't take this into account. Shorter window sizes, window reset markers, and explicit offset information could mitigate those problems.
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