I made the unfortunate post about asking why people liked Arch so much (RIP my inbox I’m learning a lot from the comments) But, what is the best distro for each reason?
RIP my inbox again. I appreciate this knowledge a lot. Thank you everyone for responding. You all make this such a great community.
Debian stable.
Everybody think they are a special snowflake who needs bleeding edge, or a specific package manager or DE or whatever. Truth is 99.99% do not. They just like to believe they do, claim they do, try it, inflict self pain for longer than they need, convince themselves that truly they are, because of the pain, special.
Chill, just go with stable, it’s actually fine.
Edit: posted from Arch, not even sarcasm.
As someone who ran Debian Stable for a while, this is not a distro for “99.99%”.
First, Debian, while very stable in its core, commonly has same random issues within DE’s and even programs that may likely just sit there until the next release comes along.
Second, a release cycle of 2 years is actually a giant and incredibly noticeable lag. You may love your system when it just releases, but over time, you will realize your system is old, like, very damn old. It will look old, it will act old, and the only thing you can do is install flatpaks for your preferred programs so that they’d be up to date.
This isn’t just programs. It is your desktop environment. It is Wine (gamers, you’re gonna cry a lot unless you work it around with flatpaks like Bottles, which will feel like insane workaround you wouldn’t have to have with a better fitting distro).
It is the damn kernel, so you may not even be able to install Debian on newest hardware without unsupported and potentially unstable backporting tricks.
Don’t get me wrong, Debian is absolutely great in what it does, and that is providing a rock solid environment where nothing changes. But recommending it for everyone? Nope.
I already posted on this a while ago but that’s is a recurring misconception. No distribution, literally 0, provides all software to the latest version or to the version one expects. Consequently IMHO it is perfectly acceptable to go beyond what the official package manager of the distribution offers. It can be flatpaks, am, build from source, etc but the point precisely is that the distribution is about a shared practical common ground to build on top of. A distribution is how to efficiently get to a good place. I also run Debian stable on my desktop and for gaming, I use Steam. It allows me to get Wine, yes, but also Proton and even ProtonFix so that I basically point and click to run games. I do NOT tinker to play Elden Ring, Baldur’s Gate 3, Clair Obscur, etc and my hardware is well supported.
So… sure if you consider a distribution as something you must accept as-is and NOT rely on any of the available tools to get the latest software you actually need, can be games but can be tools e.g. Blender, Cura, etc, then you WILL have a tough time but that’s the case for all distributions anyway.
TL;DR: a distribution is the base layer to build on. Its package manager, on Debian and elsewhere, is not the mandatory and sole way to get the software you need.
I feel like a lot of your points were true at one point, but are becoming lest relevant.
For one, at least with XFCE, I found myself not really running into DE bugs.
Also, I don’t think two years is as obnoxious anymore. During the era of the GTK 4 transition a couple, it drove me nuts, but now that a lot of APIs like that have stabilized, I really don’t notice much of a difference between Debian Testing and Stable. I installed and daily drove Bookworm late in its lifecycle on my laptop, and in terms of DE and applications, I haven’t noticed anything. I get the feeling Debian’s gotten better at maintenance in the past few years - I especially see this with Firefox ESR. There was a time where the version was several months behind the latest major release of ESR, but usually it now only takes a month or two for a new ESR Firefox to come to Debian Stable, well within the support window of the older release.
Also, I don’t think Flatpaks are a huge dealbreaker anyway - no matter what distro you’re using, you’re probably going to end up with some of them at some point because there’s some application that is the best at what it does and is only distributed as a Flatpak.
Frankly, I probably am a terrible reference for gaming, as I’m a very casual gamer, but I’ve found Steam usually eliminates most of these issues, even on Debian.
Also, the official backports repository has gotten really easy. My laptop had an unsupported Wi-Fi chipset (it was brand new), so I just installed over ethernet, added the repo, and the install went smoothly. There were a few bugs, but none of these were specific to Debian. Stability has been great as ever.
In conclusion, I think right around Bookworm, Debian went from being the stable savant to just being an all-around good distro. I’ll elaborate more on why I actually like Debian in a comment directly replying to the main post.
I might disagree with 99.999% like you - maybe I’d put it in the 50-75% range.
As a KDE fan, I had some bugs on some devices (like on one of the laptops, wallpapers did not install correctly and the setting to always show battery charge didn’t work) even on Debian 12.
XFCE is well-known for stability, but seems to be increasingly irrelevant for the average/newbie user because the interface looks outdated and configuring is relatively complicated.
Interesting you mentioned Firefox ESR - iirc, even at release the version shipped with Debian 12 was very old, prompting many to install Firefox as a flatpak. Two years later, it’s two years older.
Flatpaks are good and suitable options for many tasks - no argument here! But some things are just better installed natively, and there Debian just…shows.
Steam is a godsend, but there are many non-Steam games and, importantly, programs out there, and launching them through Steam often feels like yet another bloated and slow workaround; besides, you cannot choose Wine over Proton, and sometimes (granted: rarely) you may want to use Wine specifically.
To conclude - it’s alright to choose Debian anyway, it is good! But I just feel like newbies and casual users could save a lot of trouble and frustration simply going with something that doesn’t require all that - say, Fedora (non-atomic), or OpenSUSE, and then go from there to whatever they like. There are plenty of distributions that are stable, reliable, but without the tradeoffs Debian sets.
If you feel like stability is your absolutely biggest priority ever, and you have experience managing Linux systems - by all means, go Debian. But by that point you’ll already know what you want.
Debian Stable actually updates Firefox ESR through the typically on by default security channel.
The current ESR version in there is 128, which is about a year old, which replaced the 115 that came with Debian 12 by default.
The newest ESR, 140 just came out 2 weeks ago. 128 still has 2 months of security updates, and 140 has already been packaged for sid. I have no doubts 140 will come before those 2 months are up.
Now the KDE thing actually sounds like it sucks.
Oh, didn’t know, thanks for sharing on the Firefox side!