Comment by zamalek

14 days ago

If you want something relatively uninteresting: Fedora or Debian (honestly, stable is fine).

If you want something extremely reliable, more modern, but may require some learning to tweak: Silverblue or Kinoite.

17 comments

zamalek

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direwolf20  14 days ago

Debian updates even less frequently than Ubuntu and stays with years old versions of packages. If you're looking for fresh, Debian is not it. Maybe Arch?

  • horsawlarway  14 days ago

    Yeah, the folks in here recommending Debian as a solution to this problem are insane.

    I love Debian, it's a great distro. It's NOT the distro I'd pick to drive things like my laptop or personal development machine. At least not if you have even a passing interest in:

    - Using team communication apps (slack/teams/discord)

    - Using software built for windows (Wine/Proton)

    - Gaming (of any form)

    - Wayland support (or any other large project delivering new features relatively quickly)

    - Hardware support (modern linux kernels)

    I'd recommend it immediately as a replacement for Ubuntu as a server, but I won't run it for daily drivers.

    Again - Arch (or it's derivatives) are basically the best you can get in that space.

    • cosmic_cheese  14 days ago

      I think Debian Stable, Ubuntu LTS, and derivatives thereof are particularly poor fits for general consumers who are more likely to try to run the OS on a random machine they picked up from Best Buy that’s probably built with hardware that kernels any older than what ships in Fedora are unlikely to support.

      The stable/testing/etc distinction doesn't really help, either, because it's an alien concept to those outside of technical spheres.

      I strongly believe that the Fedora model is the best fit for the broadest spread of users. Arch is nice for those capable of keeping it wrangled but that's a much smaller group of people.

      4 replies →

    • fiddlerwoaroof  14 days ago

      Over time I evolved to Debian testing for the base system and nix for getting precise versions of tools, which worked fairly well. But, I just converted my last Debian box to nixos

      3 replies →

    • fc417fc802  14 days ago

      You're allowed to throw debian testing or arch in a chroot. The only thing that doesn't work well for is gaming since it's possible for the mesa version to diverge too far.

    • adornKey  13 days ago

      Currently Debian wants to deprecate GTK2. So even the guys that are interested in stability might start to see problems with Debian. The key problem of Linux is that it doesn't have a stable API to write long living GUI-software for. So far Debian was the way to go. Maybe recommending Debian will become even less popular soon.

    • r_lee  14 days ago

      Debian has multiple editions, if you want Arch, go for sid/testing.

      Stable is stable as in "must not be broken at all costs" kind of stable.

      basically everything works just fine. there's occasionally a rare crash or gnome reset where you need to login again, but other than that not many problems.

      3 replies →