Debian + nix + flatpak is okayish
I use arch (btw) on my personal machine because I hate myself, but on my servers and the computers of people I move off of Windows I always install Debian and KDE/Gnome, for simplicity and stability.
For all the fear mongering about rolling release distros I’ve only been burned once like 5 years ago by some Nvidia driver bug.
I still do the same thing though.
All my personal servers/sbcs run Debian
I do enough DevOps at work, I don’t need my free time to be a job too
I’ve been liking vanilla Debian more and more lately. It takes a bit of time to set up properly, and there are some drawbacks for certain software stacks. But in general, rock stable, no muss, barely any fuss.
Once it’s set up, it’s awesome for workhorse servers.
And as long as you don’t need anything cutting edge, it’s not bad as a desktop OS. I used Debian12 with the Plasma DE for a while at a job I had and it was very usable. A few weird issues, but nothing terrible.
Currently running PopOS and thinking about switching to Mint but maybe Debian?
Do you want to live the boring stable life, where you can just build and build and build your personal poop castle on top of that solid OS for years and years? If yes, switch to Debian. You won’t be reinstalling till you get so bored that you get the urge to self-harm. We can’t afford new hardware anyways, but even if we do, the same install will work on the new system with few tweaks. 😆
The initial setup is a bit more annoying than Pop/Mint/Ubuntu but not too much more. Upgrades are also a bit more annoying but not too much more. There’s good documentation for both of those procedures.
I can’t even say the initial setup was more annoying than Mint.
Awesome,thanks!
What if my new hardware ends up being RISC V?
RISCV, potato, unprocessed sand…it’s all hardware anyway
IIRC Debian supports RISC V
It’s just the matter of defaults, especially since Mint has Debian edition too. Personally I just cut off the “middleman” and go straight to Debian. Unless you really like Cinnamon, because you’ll obviously have better experience on Mint with it.
LMDE, best of both worlds
++ Came here to say this.
I run Linux mint debian edition. Best of both worlds.
Oooooh
It is the way.
I’ve got two computers. My gaming pc is running CachyOS, and my other computer which is basically for messing around with and watching movies, used to be running Mint, but I just today switched over to Debian with XFCE as the DE and I’m liking it so far. Super bare bones but that’s what I wanted for this computer anyway so it works great for me.
The ultimate solution is to have 3 notebooks with 3 different distros.
Obviously
Or two notebooks, a desktop, and a server 😆
My vote is on CachyOS
its pretty good
I just did this as a complete noob. Well, PopOS is still on my gaming rig, but my secondary PC is now Debian.
I expected it to be way more barebones, but it turns out that my experience has been like 90% identical.
Nice. Thanks
I run Mint with Cinnamon on my Desktop PC and Debian with Gnome on a mini PC. I use the latter as a server and disabled the GUI, but Gnome was hard to get used to. I use my PC for casual gaming, browsing, and casual Python development. I am not a Linux power user but pretty familiar with the terminal. Setting up native Python without relying on UV/conda on Debian was a nightmare, but I guess that’s an edge case. I really love Linux Mint, and I also really like Cinnamon.
If you’re used to Windows then maybe give KDE a shot. Similar concepts to Windows (like a taskbar at the bottom of the screen) but extremely customizable. You can install KDE on Debian - on an existing system, the easiest way is to run tasksel and select KDE Plasma.
I disabled the graphical interface as I use the mini PC as a server and only ssh to it. I used Ubuntu with gnome at work for a couple of years.
Never tried out KDE, I know it is very popular. But I am super happy with Cinnamon and I don’t see a reason to switch on my main PC. Of course I grew up with Windows, that may explain why I get along with Cinnamon so well…
I’ve been using Debian on servers for 20+ years, but ended up using Fedora on my desktop and laptop.
Debian is stable, meaning it doesn’t change often. Packages don’t get major version upgrades during the lifetime of a Debian release. That’s fantastic on servers, but can be annoying on clients since you don’t get the very latest drivers, the newest version of KDE, etc. Linux drivers move pretty quickly, especially for newer hardware.
You can run Debian
testing, which is a more up-to-date development branch, but you need to make sure you pull security updates fromunstableas the security team do not upload totesting. https://github.com/khimaros/debian-hybridIf you’re new to Linux, then also consider Linux Mint Debian Edition.
I’m literally the opposite. I have been on Red Hat since Halloween and all servers I have ever touched have been Red Hat or a close fork of RHEL. When I decided to go Linux for my daily driver and more self hosting I went Pop!_OS on my laptop, Linux Mint for my wife, and Linux Mint Debian Edition for all my home systems.
Red Hat is for work. Debian is for life.
Corporations refer to this as work-life balance.
I realize that’s it’s completely irrational, but I hate the name Pop!_OS, such that it may have kept me from checking it out to-date! I think it’s so stupid. And why does it need the exclamation mark?? But maybe I should look into it…
I actually do not recommend it at the moment. They are working on their new DE (Cosmic) so the current stable release is very old.
Personal anecdote - a year ago I switched my Framework laptop from Ubuntu to Debian, on ZFS, and it’s been smooth sailing. The kernel is surprisingly new.
This is why I use MX, it is Debian based, but always up to date, for instance I have kernel 6.18.6. Firefox is always the latest a few hours after release, and always in .deb, no flatpak. MX has a couple of their utilities that are useful to setup your system too.
Recently tried MX and definitely +1.
The disclaimer is I haven’t tried too many of the shiny new distros to compare to, but compared to RHEL and Manjaro (ugh), Ubuntu, and a few other ‘traditional’ choices, MX has been crazy easy to setup and use.
The one thing that hasn’t “just worked” is a USB4 dock that kinda’ works like extra PCIe lanes (it’s just how that style of dock works), which of course the OS is going to freak out if a few PCIe devices suddenly disappear when unplugged. It’s not exactly a hot-swappable protocol!
I’d like to know how to get it working flawlessly, but everything else has been great.
Bia(n)sed
There is no GNU/Linux, there’s only Debian
Only linux distro I’ve ever used that completely shit the bed and refused to boot. Why me?
That’s captured in the tier list.
Over the years I have several times fixed broken installs and upgrades on Debian.
Definitely not good for new users if were talking desktop.
Blasphemy!
Maybe not amazing, but good, surely
I describe Debian as the “raw” linux experience, where you have to do a lot of manual work for specific things to work like drivers.
For example on Debian you have to follow This Manual for Nvidia drivers whereas on Linux Mint (and iirc this opens immediately after installing the OS) you have Driver Manager and press the install button for the driver you need.
Or just use MX Linux and have the same experience with clicking, “install nvidia drivers”, and off you go.
Only if you have an older computer and dont need any modern drivers and dont care about graphics or music creation or gaming, and dont care that you right have to put a lot of work into getting up and running like you’re used to. But new users usually care about one or more of those things. That’s why the distros that build on Debian exist.
90% of people only ever use a browser on their computer
I think that’s a high number, maybe 90% use a browser 90% of the time. But it’s pretty common to need to use a printer or scanner which many new ones aren’t easy to get Linux drivers for, watch a video that requires audio drivers for your computer, use a video camera and mic for a telehealth visit or school which requires drivers and software. Most of that doesn’t come with Debian or on the default repos. Web browsers do more than just read the web.
Seriously what audio device needs drivers that haven’t existed for decades by now?
As long as the new user makes the mistake of buying a perfectly matching desktop, it’s fine.
Uzumaki Ubunto
