[BbzzbB]

I moved to Linux last year (my T430s was unbearable with Windows, but turns out still great with Linux). Briefly tried some Arch distros (which felt like a time black hole I don't care for) and Ubuntu before settling for Debian. Partly because it seems like a pretty "pure"/minimalistic OS, because I figured it's a good OS for servers too so might as well get familiar with it and because I wanted to run i3 so wanted to avoid the "bloat" from Ubuntu (which I now realize is negligeable).

While it's been serving me well, it still feels quirky and a lot of hardware stuff just didn't work out of the box so I've accumulated a fair few hacks and I dread having to butt my head against those again when this laptop inevitably craps out. Sometimes it's just finding the package you need but I also had to do a lot googling and changing speficic lines from specific config files for a bunch of things. Namely my volume buttons, mute button, Bluetooth, Bluetooth devices, recorder, brightness buttons and others I forget. My volume buttons still don't work if it's through a Bluetooth device but I'm just putting up with it cause I couldn't find an answer fast enough and on a new connect I have to explicitly go in pavucontrol (or whichever it was, "firefox no sound bluetooth debian" is seared in my search history). I never managed to get the Steam for Linux thing working and when I try again it seems to clash with the remnants of some old attempt.

Maybe I just don't have enough experience and it would be the same on any Debian or Linux distro but AFAIK Ubuntu does much better at handling drivers out of the box.

I like the simplicity of it at face value but I'm not sure why I wouldn't go with Ubuntu next time to avoid the hassles or if I'm not being stubborn by not going for Windows with WSL (assuming I don't buy another old horse). Worst is I still need to run a Windows VM in it when I'm compiling something to .exe or some specific Windows only software.

[jack-torrance]

Debian in my opinion is best on servers which will have uptimes of months or even years on wired connections.

In such setups, the hardware driver quirks were most probably solved decades ago and as a bonus you don't have to babysit the server. Just install the OS, forget about it and focus on whatever is really bringing you value.

What drove you away from Arch Linux on your laptop?

[BbzzbB]

Can't say I was drove away from Arch as I just tried Manjaro for a bit while figuring out what distro I wanted to stick to. But it seemed to me that it required more googling to do just about anything, and since a lot of Linux programs are made with Ubuntu in mind it seemed more straightforward to get going with a Debian based distro. Might have misread the situation since I had zero Linux experience, but I figured sticking with Debian was gonna minimize how much time I'd have to be setting and fixing my system. I think there was something in particular I was struggling to get working but my memory is hazy on that.

Probably gonna try again some time but for now I try to think as little as possible about my OS as long as I can code on it.

[hollerith]

Most of the info you need is on wiki.archlinux.org, which is so good that users of other distros prefer it to other sources of Linux info. (I'm a Fedora user, but refer to it so often that I have a "shortcut" in my search engine for "site:wiki.archlinux.org", and others on this site have praised it.)

[Zardoz84]

discover -> install Steam

Work flawless on Debian 12

[bornfreddy]

I was on Debian years ago, now on Ubuntu, switching back as soon as I find some time. The direction Ubuntu is taking (especially snap) is simply not something I want to experience. Besides, not much (or any) added value I can see.

[BbzzbB]

Not very familiar with Ubuntu's direction. I see snap for Debian too, sometimes some apps just give me that option to run it.

Is Ubuntu still better at having every driver working out of the box and being kinda seemless or is that more a thing of the past?