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in Debian (because Debian was always mentioned as a distro good for servers, or stable machines that are ok with outdated software)
And while I get that Debian does have software that isn’t as up to date, I’ve never felt that the software was that outdated.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?
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 the absolute goat so long as your work flow fits inside of the scope of Debian which 99% of everybody’s well, even most regular normal gamers will do just fine in Debian using flat packs.
You just have to also accept the fact that if you’re doing something niche like VR gaming or using weird third-party custom hardware or something Debian sucks ass. A lot of my VR kit straight up doesn’t even support anything that uses apt.
It only supports Fedora and Arch. Because a lot of it straight up will not work with flat pack anything. There’s just no support and s*** brakes constantly. You need up-to-date libraries and some of these libraries update multiple times a week. It’s just not inside the scope of something like Debian.
Always try Debian first. If it doesn’t work then try something else. It’s usually the best rule of thumb.
agreed, Debian’s rock solid for 99.99% of people.
You just have to also accept the fact that if you’re doing something niche like VR gaming or using weird third-party custom hardware or something Debian sucks ass.
i’ve worked on predominantly debian based infrastructure professionally for multimedia companies in the last 10ish years, so it’s a little bit funny to me that og flavored debian doesn’t do this, but it clearly can if you can afford an army of developers to create it for you.
entire multi-billion dollar revenue streams literally exist because of debian doing this and doing it well, but everyone popularly and unquestioningly believe that you can’t do it on linux. lol
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”.
There is absolutely no issue with it.
But there are lots of other distros that add things to it which are great for desktop.
GUI tools for driver installation and kernel switching, snapshots, preinstalled Steam+Wine+Codecs+Flatpak, newer and more software, atomic updates, a faster package manager, more third party support, etc.Debian is better than it ever was, but so are lots of other distros, especially the ones that build on it.
Nowadays you really have the choice between “good” and “better”.Debian might work but it will always be behind and if any performance upgrades are done at a kernel level or a DE then you won’t get them until those fixes are potentially already obsolete.
GPU drivers and DEs lagging behind, mostly.
Something like Fedora which releases newer code quicker will provide a better desktop/laptop experience. It’s the same reason other stable distros, like the EL distros, aren’t the best for desktops/laptops.
Historically, desktop applications would also be versions behind, but Flatpak really helps with this.
At this point, Debian is probably fine as a distro for a few year old computer that won’t be helped by fractional scaling. Pick a DE and install applications from Flathub.
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’ll be honest : because people is ignorant.
They tried Debian once few years ago, it didn’t have the exact driver they wanted out of the box, they gave up. They think that’s the normal and current experience.
Reality is I use Debian every day on my servers, SBCs, laptop but also my desktop. I’ve been gaming on it since the first day of the installation and it just worked. Sure I had to follow https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers and basically follow those steps. It took me maybe 15min and 1 reboot but since then NO tinkering, 0, and I’m gaming nearly daily from indie to AAA, from 2D to 3D to VR. As I mentioned in another reply sure I might not have perfectly optimized all my performance but I don’t give a shit, I’m just gaming!
Also as I mentioned elsewhere the “cutting edge” is bullshit. You can have a Debian installation, stable, and cherry pick the packages you want. Heck you can even pull from a forge the software you want, built it, run it. That’s how “bleeding edge” it can be. Of course you can use VM (with GPU passthrough), distrobox, AppImage, Nix (different from NixOS), etc so they are many many ways to make sure you use the absolute latest without breaking your system.
TL;DR: Debian does not position itself as a gaming distribution. A lot of gamers want to optimize everything for gaming and consequently assume a specialized distribution will do better. Meanwhile people who JUST want to play can definitely do so on Debian.
Yeah but ppa and apt are the worse of all the options. Other wise you right.
Fuck ppas horrid system.
Debian generally doesn’t use PPAs, that’s an Ubuntu thing. What’s your beef with apt?
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.
Fedora was the first to get my NVidia Card and proprietary wifi card working out of the box without intervening. It also updates my Dell firmware out of the box. Debian, last time I checked, does not. I haven’t tried since before Bullseye.
Similar to Debian but tangentally, I run Guix which falls under the same GNU umbrella of what “free software” is and I have to break that with non-free channels to get the same laptop running.
I’m running Debian 12 (Bookworm) on a Dell laptop and it updates my firmware out of the box as well. I’m not running any NVidia though, so I can’t comment on whether that’d work or not.
debian is meant to be stable and ancient, it’s for servers
Debian unstable has entered the chat
It works a treat on old laptops. I daily drive it on an old Latitude and it’s awesome
My FP right now:
The reason I don’t recommend it by default is that there is no updater across releases.
The official upgrade process is to modify apt sources files and run upgrade, then full-upgrade, etc.
That’s fine for me but it makes it hard to recommend to people who may not be as willing to deal with modifying system files and reading some upgrade notes
If your sources track stable/testing or oldstable, you don’t need to change anything, that said I think the offical stance it to track the relase name (trixie bookworm etc)
alright, but you have to do it only once in every 10 years, so…
Debian is more like AOSP. It’s a starting point. Super bare. More commonly used in servers and such.
What would be considered “bare” about it? Granted, I’m not gaming on it or anything, but I’ve found it to work pretty well out of the box, just downloading software as I need - but nothing that has caused any sort of headache due to missing drivers or anything like that.
To me it seems like it would be pretty simple for most people to switch over from windows - albiet maybe not for the super beginners that have never seen a command line - but for most semi-tech literate, I would think it would be a decent entry into Linux.
Genuinely curious what is actually stripped down or missing, because maybe it’s just something that I’m not even aware that I’m missing out on, lol
Older drivers won’t support newer hardware. Only includes default apps from gnome and KDE. No DE tweaks to speak of. No performance optimizations. No Gear Lever. No fractional scaling implemented, etc. etc.
I guess it makes sense that I’m comfortable with using Debian then, lol, because I don’t know what most of those things you mentioned are - haha.
Thanks for the explanation though :)
I don’t know the AOSP acronym so I’ll take a guess: Always On Server Platform?
Super bare. 🤣🤣🤣
Debian is probably Thee most supported distro with the most packages available.
Debian is also among the absolute best among Linux desktop options, and actually quite popular.
There’s a reason Debian is still the most forked distro.Debian is probably Thee most supported distro with the most packages available.
I’m not talking about availability. I’m talking about comes pre-installed so the user doesn’t have to go out and find them to use basic functionality.
Debian is also among the absolute best among Linux desktop options, and actually quite popular.
I did not say it was not great or popular.
There’s a reason Debian is still the most forked distro.
This is not the dunk you think it is…
While I get what you mean about things being pre-installed for super new people to Linux/terminal. . . If it has a apt package, it’s as easy as “sudo apt install xyz”. Also, I thi k Debian comes with the synaptic package manager which makes it fairly easy to install as well. With that said though, I do see your point, as it’s one more hurdle.
If it has a apt package, it’s as easy as “sudo apt install xyz”
This is the kind of ignorant shit that relegates Linux to nerd circles. What do you do with this information? What is xyz, and exactly xyz because if you get a single letter wrong it does not work. Further the user has to already know what they want, which a new user will not.
I’m talking about comes pre-installed
Apart from Steam not being a standard installed item, it is very feature full.
For 32 bit you also need to enable multi-arch.But apart from gaming it is in no way bare and very very far from “super bare”. Ans Steam is pretty easy to install.
I did not say it was not great or popular.
You wrote it was mostly for servers. Which although it is an excellent server distro, it is most definitely developed at least as much for desktop use.
This is not the dunk you think it is…
I don’t think you really understand the implications.
Apart from Steam not being a standard installed item, it is very feature full.
I’ve just given you several examples of how it’s not.
For 32 bit you also need to enable multi-arch.
Just making my point for me now.
You wrote it was mostly for servers
No I wrote that’s it’s more commonly used in servers.
I don’t think you really understand the implications.
I don’t think you do.
I think you’re treating this like a pit fight.
I dunno what that means. I gave what I felt like a very simple take and this person started to argue with me, not the other way around.
It looks like one of you is treating the other as a person deserving of respectful conversation.
Debian and Red Hat are the foundation for most of the popular distros out there.
As much as I’d like to recommend Debian, its release cycle really leaves a lot to be desired for pragmatic computer users.
Bugs stick around for years, and with each new release you get new bugs that won’t be fixed for years.
It could be better if the ecosystem had more support, but as it stands right now there are just better options for the desktop space.
It’s fine for servers because they have the resources to make sure server programs aren’t a buggy or featureless mess.
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.
I’ve been running debian sid on desktop for 4 years, I think. Yes, I don’t care if it breaks. I wanted to try debian and didn’t want to use old packages at that point. These days I don’t really need the latest things. I recently switched to testing - I only needed to replace a few words in a few files in /etc. I didn’t even need wiki or anything for that, because testing is almost like sid. If this doesn’t break on me majorly, I might not switch and just replace “testing” with “forky”. I’m really satisfied with debian.
Others already explained basically everything. I’d like to elaborate and offer a few examples to support them.
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On potential users:
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The people who look for distros to try are seen as newbies by linux users, and therefore are recommended newbie-friendly distros. Also, debian is conservative: it rarely offers shiny new things, so its desktop use isn’t high. There isn’t much to be excited about, so there are no hype cycles. The current “shiny new thing” in debian was the recent change in apt’s interface (now it formats its output into tables, for example), compare that to “atomic” distros. People often still use apt-get (it is in the guides for some reason) instead of apt so even this news in nothing to them.
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Furthermore, software development often happens with the latest libraries around. It’s often a great help that Arch ships the latest software. Debian doesn’t have that. While languages these days have their own package managers, having the latest devtools, editors, etc. to try out is harder to do on debian. Therefore, IT students and software engineers have better time on faster-moving distros. Debian is more for the sysops/sysadmin people ( you can leave it there on auto-update and not care for 2 or more years ). The above further restricts its appeal and userbase.
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Even further, Debian might be bigger than it seems, as others have pointed it out. Perceived marketshare is often based on desktop use. See EU OS’s FOSDEM presentation on how opensuse has a bigger company behind it than ubuntu.
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On “latest drivers”:
- It used be much harder to configure Debian. Recently ( think it was with Bullseye) I installed it on an old machine, and debian didn’t install the right wifi drivers by default. I think it also lacked the proper firmware. This changed only with Bookworm. Back in 2008, I also tried it on my pentium 3 I had then. Debian didn’t have ath5k at that time, and the ndiswrapper hack was harder to pull off for me than just using mandriva, or later, lubuntu and salix.
- I heard that these days, people expect linux to fully support their hardware on day1. They also expect it to just run on any new hardware they buy. Also, games often need the latest optimizations in drivers: it might just be the thing that pushes the fps count above 30, 60 or 120. They also that they want the driver bugfixes to come ASAP. Early on during a release cycle of a game, driver updates sometimes give big improvements. While using the latest drivers on debian is possible, and not too hard (Compiling a newer stock kernel is easy, even if it complies slowly. Mesa isn’t hard either. Still, these require knowledge of old & basic dev tools, and also new ones.), ubuntu offers new drivers to LTS kernels, they are called HWE. No idea how doable this on debian, I never needed such things.
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On “stability”:
- What people usually don’t think about it that there are different kinds of stabilities. Debian offers something like API stability, so that user-provided software on the same version of debian rarely - if ever - breaks. It’s not necessarily shipping the most stable software, but it has a guarantee that updates won’t break anything. Even a slight change can disqualify being included. This very slow process resulted in the old and famous xscreensaver vs debian drama. The abovementioned stability also applies to other distros, but to a lesser extent, I believe. Mostly due to the 2-year release cycle.
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On “ease of use”:
- Debian doesn’t have a user repo like AUR, so it isn’t as easy to install 3rd party stuff (I know, makedeb, flatpak, snap, pkgsrc, nix & guix exist), debian is so big that anybody providing packages will do it (to list a few examples: freetube, discord, librewolf, signal, Trinity DE, and there are bleeding edge emacs packages available).
- Debian has docs, but I often just use arch wiki or the gentoo wiki to figure out stuff. I can only do that because I understand the differences and the similarities. Newbies would have trouble with this. Also, ubuntu automatically configures a few things, like installing something with a systemd service also will enable that service. Debian doesn’t do that.
Thanks for the thorough response :)
How bad is the situation with security updates in sid? This page shows a grim picture: https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/
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Because linux distribution recommendations are written by people who have nothing better to do than be hypnotized by the jangling keys of whatever’s new or hot for people who have nothing better to do than be hypnotized by the jangling keys of whatever’s new or hot.
It’s the same reason rhel doesn’t get recommended tbh.
the jangling keys
So historically not manjaro.
I haven’t read through the other responses in the thread, but I don’t think it’s the slightly old software that’s the problem. I think it has more to do with using older kernels, meaning that the latest hardware won’t always be supported (on the stable branch at least - there’s always testing and unstable too of course which may have better hardware support).
That may have changed with recent releases though - I haven’t used Debian for several years now. But if your hardware is supported then it’s a pretty solid choice.
Some other people sometimes mention that Debian isn’t as beginner friendly as Ubuntu or Mint, but my experiences have been similar to yours - I found Debian to more user-friendly than Ubuntu for example. Assuming that the hardware works of course - if it doesn’t then it obviously is a worse choice.
I spent most of last year running LMDE6 and while it started off good, things just got more frustrating to troubleshoot and the system felt buggier over time. (Which I know is not how things are supposed to be for “stable” Debian.) Switched to CachyOS a couple months ago and things work so much smoother.