It’s my choice but Arch and its derivatives look like the trend like CachyOS which is #1 right now on visits on distrowatch. Also I’ve heard Google use Debian as gLinux and I feel many other giants also use it and sponsor it and I’m not comfortable choosing it as my distro. Can the sponsors togethwr with students or any other interested use it for their PCs, either coding or ordinary use? It strictly promotes free but worried about giants and sponsors.
My wife uses Debian and is very happy with it.
She uses it both for gaming and studio recordings with Ardour.Debian has for decades been among the most respected distros in the Linux world, and it still is.
If you want something solid, Debian should be your first choice.Edit PS:
She also uses it for programming occasionally. Debian is an excellent platform for “coding” with its huge repositories.
But most Linux distros are very good for programming, and will have all the common necessary tools readily available.She uses it both for gaming and studio recordings with Ardour.
How is the gaming experience on Debian nowadays? Last time I tried it (several years ago now), it was kind of a nightmare jumping through all of the various hoops required to get it to pay nicely with an Nvidia GPU.
Nvidia drivers do not always play nice with the kernel, and can disrupt high end audio use. If you use Linux you should use an AMD or Intel GPU.
My wife used to use Nvidia, because it worked better for some games, but she finally ended up getting pissed with the proprietary Nvidia drivers, and switched to AMD about a year ago. And now all her games that used to work with Nvidia drivers also work with AMD.
AFAIK Debian support Nvidia proprietary drivers reasonably well today, but for older Nvidia cards you may be out of luck, they can be a real shitshow to get to work if you want to use the proprietary driver.
Best option is to just stop using Nvidia on Linux!
Good to know I just can’t help it cuz I hate Arch and CachyOS. I dont like their websites either.
Personally I prefer an Arch derivative, and neither of us can convince the other. 😋
However we both see the merits of “the other side”, we just have different preferences. But we also have some fun with it if some times. 😎debian has been my first choice since the 90s, but i use arch’s excellent wiki all the time.
If you wonder if “anyone uses Debian” (lol) I’m extremely curious to hear your reasons for hating Arch lmao
Edit: to answer your question, yes. Yes. “Some people” do indeed use Debian
It sounds like you’re concerned with EEE: embrace, extend, extinguish. While that might be a problem for centralized pieces of software, who are dependent upon revenue streams, core distros like Debian, Arch, Fedora, and openSUSE are developed and maintained by the community (and sponsors).
If sponsors all pulled their funding tomorrow, the projects would not suddenly cease to get updates. By extension, sponsors don’t get special seats at the table just for being a sponsor; it’s not some corporate buy-in where they get 5% voting share for donating $1M to fund hobbyists to work on the code full-time. Likewise, they don’t have special push access to inject “features” (read: enshittification) into the codebase that will eventually hamstring the code. Somebody would notice a bad pull-request and say something.
And even if they miraculously did, the codebase is open source. There are enough motivated people in the world who would fork the code into something free and open again. It’s one of the biggest strengths of FOSS.
Sponsorships help the development happen faster, but sponsors are not the drivers of Linux—we are. Choose the distro you like, and enjoy!
Then why sponsor?
As a sidenote, you might be asking why sponsors would give money to these projects:
- Tax write-off. Many projects are governed by nonprofits, and giving to them gives businesses a tax break.
- They get a better codebase for their own use. If they invest money, they’ll also be getting volunteer labor for free, so it’s win-win.
I use Debian. It just works and is reliable.
i have debian on my server; if i could go back and use it on my desktop and laptop instead of mint i would too (nothing against mint just love debian)
I’m sure Debian would implode if any big corp started to make “hostile” changes to it. It was by some considered controversial to include non free firmware by default - that should tell you a little about how much people care about Debian, as including the non free by default is against the core of opensource.
Yep millions of us.
Most commonly due to stability.
Long term. It took effort and understanding to add newer versions of programs to it. Those of us with these skills managed. But it put off a lot of we want/need the latest without effort folks.
Over the last 10 years. Flat pack or appimage have come far enough. It is rare if ever I need to build any software I don’t want to.
Yeah stability is also the reason for Debian. Arch has more maintenance unlike Debian’s set it and forget it. Like Windows right? Fedora looks heavy to me though. I wanna try others too thats not win11.
I think Fedora is taking off because of enterprise use & Bazzite? Or something else that uses their image thing
Debian has some maintenance. But if you think windows doesn’t. Your already having issue.
But Debian is one of the most documented distros. If your having an issue. Odd are multiple people have documented how to resolve it.
Linux as a whole. Requires you to have a basic understanding, of what and why you are doing things. If not you will have a bad time.
Debians biggest issue. Is the default 0 non free firmware and software. This means some drivers etc are not going to install automatically.
So for any new install. Unless you have an entirely open system. You will need to manually edit the source files. And install extra packages.
If you have Nvidia this is a big issue. Bit well documented.
The big issue is when a new version comes out. If things change dramatically. Their is a delay in that clear documentation. This continues through their testing to stable releases.
But they are excellent at ensuring security releases continue well beyond the upgrade. Years usually.
Debians biggest issue. Is the default 0 non free firmware and software. This means some drivers etc are not going to install automatically.
I think Debian 12 changed this and now include non free (firmware?) as default. That’s when I installed it with no issues.
Debian has been our choice for web hosting for the last fifteen years, and my choice of desktop PC for the last three without issue.
Most games run out of the box with proton, if that’s your worry, and you can use heroic to get proton going with games from epic and gog with reasonable ease. Wine in general, for me, has had better luck running old legacy windows programs better than windows can manage these days.
I wouldn’t take Debian’s stability and reliability over anything; I can do everything I need with it.
I use Debian on all my servers and virtual machines due to its slow update cadence and leanness.
Rolling releases work well until they don’t. Let the voluntary beta testers be as smug as they want to be. They are part of the Linux ecosystem who test and report bugs for fixing before they hit other distros.
They might have some performance benefits and if problems arise, there are ways to snapshot back to a working state, recover and many will be knowledgeable to fix some bugs themselves, but ask yourselves, do you actually want to go through all that?
Debian is perfectly fine for what it does.
I am curious… what was running through the mind of your downvoter?! everything you said was spot on. linux based distributions are at great place right now and debian is the perfect distro for my needs.
when I want to 'splore I will boot an semi-exotic like aros or hurd… how is templeos doing these days?
Pretty much anything I do is Debian, ive said it quite a bit before so this may be a repeat of previous comments, but…
Its solid, stable, easy to deploy with incredible flexibility and just about everything out there supports it. I do have a few boxes with arch, and they are also just fine - I wouldn’t use it as a server, personally, but its perfectly good for a “very current” approach to desktops/laptops.
Debian on my server, my desktop, my laptop, and my gaming computer. That last one might be the most questionable choice, but so far it has been working well.
Just works. No issues.
debian on servers all the way, since 2000
Debian is perfect in particular for work. Stable, free, capable. Hardly more to want. And it’s been almost the only stable bedrock in my tech career of over two decades. I’ve probably made over a million USD with it, while everything else eventually gets taken by a corporation and becomes folly to build on. Free software forever
I currently use LMDE, yes. I just have spent too much time on the programs I already installed to move on from it I guess. Nothing’s come up. It Just Works™ and the wife loves it
Heard some stuff about them introducing bugs via the downstream patching system though? All that package management stuff is a bit over my head.
I mean I run one arch machine but have 10 ish Debian machines.
