[pmontra]

I'm a super user but the last time I tried to use Debian as a desktop OS the experience was so disappointing that I reformatted to Ubuntu. I gave a shot to KDE and reformatted again to Gnome after a couple of weeks. That was 2014. I removed Debian as a possibility, KDE maybe someday. On a server Debian is OK.

[bzb4]

What didn’t you like about Debian on the desktop? Old software?

[billme]

I personally use any distro based on the situation.

As others have pointed out, common reasoning behind picking a distro include: hardware requirements, existing ecosystems, end user, package management, configurableness, security, long-term support, ease of learning, driver support, core dev team’s opinions, funding, etc.

[pmontra]

I don't remember exactly, it was 6 years ago. I remember the general feeling of having to do too much work to get a usable desktop. Maybe the settings? Keep in mind that I don't need anything fancy. I liked Gnome 2 and I stayed with Gnome Fallback until last year when there were enough Gnome Shell extensions to bend it to what I like a desktop to be.

Maybe Debian is on par now. Old software can be worked around with containers and third party apt repositories. I often do that on Ubuntu too.

[dleslie]

Debian has improved greatly in the last six years.

Try it with the xfce or mate flavours.

[megavolcano]

These days Debian Gnome and default Ubuntu are so similar these days the difference is negligible once you installed 1 or 2 plugins that mimic the Ubuntu functionality. Ubuntu's gnome is just plain gnome with a few in-house extensions made by Canonical - hardly worth it in my opinion while Debian is rock solid. Buster (the current stable) is nearly perfect IMO.