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.
I just moved to Debian trixie (soon to be stable) because I needed an upgrade after ~15 years of Gentoo.
I was a proud Gentoo user. I learned a lot about systemd and kernel configuration. Many advances in portage made it possible to find the time to maintain my Gentoo setup. On my laptop I gave up Gentoo even earlier, because updating my system was just too time consuming. I actually learned less and less about the software I was using, because I was trapped in dependency conflict management. The new binary repos did save some compile time, but the actual time sinks are decision for your systems, use flags and the forementioned dependencies.
So, I installed Debian on my main workstation (two days ago). I am already using Debian on on my Raspberry Pis. I did choose a more challenging way using debootstrap, because I want to use systemd-boot, encrypted btrfs and have working hibernation. I am still busy with configuring everything.
One could argue, that I could’ve used the time on Gentoo to solve my current python_targets_python3_13 issues and do a proper world update. No, this is a future investment. I want the time to configure new stuff, not wait for dependency resolution or waste time solving blocking packages.
The main reason to switch from Gentoo to Debian is being able to install security updates fast without blocking packages in the same slot.