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.

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cosmic_cheese 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I think Debian Stable, Ubuntu LTS, and derivatives therof 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 and is 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.

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fiddlerwoaroof an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

	▲	bayindirh an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I'm using Debian testing in my daily driving desktop(s) for the last, checks notes, 20 years now? Servers and headless boxes use stable and all machines are updated regularly. Most importantly, stable to stable (i.e. 12 to 13) upgrades takes around 5 minutes incl. final reboot. I reinstalled Debian once. I had to migrate my system to 64 bit, and there was no clear way to move from 32 to 64 bit at that time. Well, once in 20 years is not bad, if you ask me.

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r_lee an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	akdev1l 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		No Debian is stable as in “it shall not change”. There are times where there are known bugs in Debian which are purposely not fixed but instead documented and worked around. That’s part of the stability promise. The behaviour shall not change which sometimes includes “bug as a feature”