What Distros do you want to shoutout and why you think they are doing well/are the best at what they do?
I am curious what is out there and have only had some experience with Linux Mint, SteamOS, and Pop!_OS
What Distros do you want to shoutout and why you think they are doing well/are the best at what they do?
I am curious what is out there and have only had some experience with Linux Mint, SteamOS, and Pop!_OS
Good summary. 👍
I haven’t noticed much difference, Debian has always been the go to distro if you wanted reliability and repositories that cover almost everything. Debian has always been an excellent choice for productivity. It’s not by accident that Debian for more than 20 years has been the distro with by far the most derivatives.
By that standard Arch is the only distro that has achieved something similar, and it may be somewhat telling that SteamOS switched from Debian based to Arch based. Arch is way smaller in scope, and more nimble and easier to maintain. But AFAIK they do not have the democratic process Debian has, so I’m not sure it can really be called community based distro like Debian. Arch has more of a top leadership.
Debian is probably the most true to the Free and Open Source ideals among the big distros.
Oh yeah, there’s a big difference now in distro conversations.
Debian was never talked about as a serious contender in distro hopping, discussions around “best distro for me”, starter for new users, etc. Just an occasional; “of you’re going to choose Ubuntu, just pick Debian and go straight to the source”.
But it was often pointed out that Debians pros is what made it not recommended for general end-user. It’s strong for servers and productivity. But its stability meant kernel and mesa updates were slow, many programs lagged. Gaming performance suffers and new hardware support is weaker. It was recognised that Ubuntu and Mint would add convenience for everyday use cases on top of Debian.
Especially the early to mid 2010s was all about “bleeding edge/rolling release is too likely to break, Debian is too stable to get updates, pick something in between”
Now, this problem is being lessened, at the same time people are liking the stability for general desktop use. Bleeding edge became highly recommended 5 - 8 years ago, and now in 2025 people care less about that and it’s easy to make stable distros work for your needs just as well.
Now people will regularly say “use Debian, it’s solid and reliable” and not follow up with “you’ll have to deal with old packages though”
Back in 2005 when Ubuntu was all the rage, the first alternative to Ubuntu was almost always Debian. Only later when Mint became a thing, that was also an obvious alternative, because it was similarly focused on being easy to use.
And also PCLinuxOS and Mandriva, those were the big recommendations as well. But we’re pre-dating the common distro hopping discussions I think we had in mind by going back that far too.
No we aren’t, Linux fora were full of them even before Ubuntu more than 20 years ago. Debian, Suse, Fedora, Mandrake, Mepis, PCLinux.
Distro hopping was always a thing people debated.
The rest of that sentence is a bit confusing, who are we? And how am I supposed to read minds? And going back was kind of where we started, because you claimed it was a new thing for Debian. Debian was definitely recommended to general users, for many good reasons. Stability and huge repository among them, but also user friendly install procedure, and good package manager, that handled dependencies way better than Suse and Fedora.
I don’t know mate. I thought we were having a cool discussion about Linux shit but you seem really hostile now. Get lost, clown.
That’s the thing though you really don’t have to deal with old packages. The ones that count are in the backports repo and for everything else there’s is flatpak. Plus I think the reason steamos switched from Debian to arch was the methodology changed from being mutable to immutable and making it more for a handheld vs installed on many systems. It had nothing to do with the quality of the distro.
I’m not discussing quality of distro here, but people’s changing perception of Debian over the years. The way that people currently use/suggest/recommend distros has put Debian more in favour than say 10 years ago, 15 years ago.
It’s always been good depending on use case, but people currently are recommending it more for general use than has been typical before. And I think it is, as you said, that some of those past limiting factors are not a big problem anymore. I did suggest that in my first post.