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in Debian (because Debian was always mentioned as a distro good for servers, or stable machines that are ok with outdated software)
And while I get that Debian does have software that isn’t as up to date, I’ve never felt that the software was that outdated.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?
But if I’m not able to update constantly, how else will I get the dopamine hits from watching the numbers go up?
People asking for distro recommendations usually ask for their desktop.
Debian is great, but it’s hardly ever the best choice for a desktop, at least not for the kind of people who ask for distro recommendations.
I’ve used it for a few years. What issue does it have for a desktop? I’ve had everything “just work”.
Everything in Debian just works, but people are looking for more features than Debian offers out of the box.
I can see why people would want Debian if they’ve been burned couple of times by distros that move very fast and break stuff.
I think those who know about Debian would already know if Debian’s for them or not.
I’d generally recommend something a bit more beginner friendly to somebody asking for a distro recommendation.
Debian takes work, especially if you have tricky, proprietary hardware that requires firmware support. It comes with that magical “free software only” mentality that makes it harder to adopt and hence why Ubuntu and Mint exist. It’s a great minimalist distro
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.
It comes with that magical “free software only” mentality
Less free than it used to be. Now you get closed source firmware by default, making the initial setup much better than it used to be.
Because it is barebones. New users need a distro to be configured for them to reasonable defaults.
One of the main historical reasons was the Debian project’s puritan approach to open source, meaning the distro was very picky about what it could easily run on. As an example, most network drivers for Realtek nics weren’t included out of the box as they contained non-free code, there was no direct way to install Nvidia drivers instead of nouveau, a lot of the hardware didn’t work in the installer unless you sideloaded the drivers from a usb stick and so on.
There was a non-free ISO version to get around this, but you needed to know of it to use it, and it wasn’t provided anywhere by default. The download page for it was just a barebone directory listing within the mirror. No link or information was provided for it on the main project page.
Starting from version 12 or 13 (don’t remember exactly) proprietary drivers have been included in the installation images, which removed the biggest pain point (IMO) for novice users. Apart from that Debian has been one of the easier distros to install, and has things like a considerably better experience when updating to the next major release. It’s not really slower to update packages than Ubuntu, as I’d be wary of recommending the non-LTS versions to novice users. They tend to be quite unstable compared to LTS.
Personally I’ve daily driven Debian for close to five years, on all my devices except the work laptop. That one is running Ubuntu 24.04 as the employer requires either that or Fedora for Linux users.
I’ll give you an example:
I tried to run an old videogame through plain wine. On ZorinOS it ran out of the box no questions attached. On Debian I had to install wine and go through a few hiccups and issues. An average user shouldn’t go crazy when the command like says something incomprehensible
I recommend Linux Mint Debian Edition to anybody who will listen
i’m guessing by the name that it’s based on debian instead of ubuntu?
does that it doesn’t have snap?
Based on Debian instead of Ubuntu, but still an official release. I didn’t quite understand the second question, sorry. Mint doesn’t allow snap by default.
i was wondering if it came with snaps enabled by default and you’ve answered it.
how about the desktop environment, is it still stock gnome/kde/lxde/xfce/whatever?
Cinnamon
For reasons similar to why plain bread doesn’t show up in sandwich recommendations.
That’s my take too… it’s certainly a soild choice, but not incredibly exciting.
boring is awesome if you need to just work all the time and for a long time.
debian is meant to be stable and ancient, it’s for servers
For desktop use debian sucks. I dont want to wait a year to update my apps. For servers its fine. Arch and Nix are my favorite rn and im looking to convert my home media server into Nix soon.
I dont want to wait a year to update my apps
Why? Are they not working as-is?
I like having the latest updates and features as soon as possible. Especially for software that’s in its early stages and regularly getting large updates. But to each their own, some people value the stability more than the features.
