I distro hopped for a bit before finally settling in Debian (because Debian was always mentioned as a distro good for servers, or stable machines that are ok with outdated software)
And while I get that Debian does have software that isn’t as up to date, I’ve never felt that the software was that outdated. Before landing on Debian, I always ran into small hiccups that caused me issues as a new Linux user - but when I finally switched over to Debian, everything just worked! Especially now with Debian 13.
So my question is: why does Debian always get dismissed as inferior for everyday drivers, and instead mint, Ubuntu, or even Zorin get recommended? Is there something I am missing, or does it really just come down to people not wanting software that isn’t “cutting edge” release?
Fedora har the same free software ethos. You can enable varies various not free repos, just like in debian. I doubt it’s a real problem? Might just have been lucky.
Fedora was the first to get my NVidia Card and proprietary wifi card working out of the box without intervening. It also updates my Dell firmware out of the box. Debian, last time I checked, does not. I haven’t tried since before Bullseye.
Similar to Debian but tangentally, I run Guix which falls under the same GNU umbrella of what “free software” is and I have to break that with non-free channels to get the same laptop running.
I’m running Debian 12 (Bookworm) on a Dell laptop and it updates my firmware out of the box as well. I’m not running any NVidia though, so I can’t comment on whether that’d work or not.