alt Hacker NewsYeah, 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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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.
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
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.
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.