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.