I’m on Debian stable on my desktop but I tinkered with SteamOS on the SteamDeck, so Arch.

no more “oops I bricked my system” moments

I don’t actually know what that means. If the system because unbootable it’s because I explicitly messed it up, for example by editing fstab or tinkering with GRUB. I honestly can not remember an apt update that broke the system, and I don’t just mean my desktop (which I use daily, to work and play) but even my remote servers running for years.

So… I think that part mostly comes down to trusting the maintainer of the pinned distribution. They are doing their best to avoid dependency hell in a complex setup but typically, if you do select stable, it will actually be stable.

I do have discussions like this every few months on Lemmy and I think most people are confused about what is an OS vs. what is an application. IMHO an application CAN be unstable, e.g. Firefox or the slicer for your 3D printer because you do want the very latest feature for some reason. The underlying building blocks though, e.g. kernel, package manager, arguably drivers, basically the lower down the stack you go, the more far reaching the consequences. So if you genuinely want an unstable system somehow, go for it, but then it is by choice, explicitly, and then I find it hard to understand how one could then not accept the risk of “oops I bricked my system” moment.

Depends what you mean by “Linux” here.

It’s probably not the kernel itself, so do you mean

• a terminal e.g. a working shell where you can run commands e.g. `ls | wc -l’ ?
• headless containers, e.g. services like Immich accessed elsewhere?
• a window manager e.g. KDE or Gnome?
• a software with a visual interface, or GUI, e.g. GCompris?

Based on that then one can answer if Termux is sufficient (or “legitimate”) or if something else is needed.

PS: You can read some of my notes on termux on different Android devices at https://fabien.benetou.fr/Tools/Android