[juujian]

I know it's a bit of a meme but I'm on Debian Stable and I am running the backport kernel, which is on version 6.19. So only one minor version away from the current 7.0.

I wish more people would consider Debian for their devices. It is a very stable system, which I appreciate, and, unlike Ubuntu, it was really an "it just works" experience, without any of the friction points that smaller distros have. I installed Debian Trixie on a very recent device (granted, all AMD for compatibility) when Trixie was still the Testing version, and all the necessary drivers were present.

Now if only I could figure out how to build packages and contribute back to Debian... Also if only AMD could get their NPU support for Linux figured out...

[raegis]

Actually, I'm running the backports kernel which is at 7.0 today.

  $ uname --kernel-release 
  7.0.10+deb13-amd64

If you run stable, Debian backports takes care of a lot of the popular stuff. Kernels, kernel modules, Rust/Cargo, CMake, Clangd, GPU firmware (AMD/Intel), GDB, LibreOffice, OpenShot video editor, and Wireguard are all kept current in backports. And there's way more than I mention here, of course. Worst case I can install unstable in a schroot and run some bleeding-egde software.

I did all of my distro hopping when I was young, 20+ years ago. I settled on Debian because life got busy and I had no time to fuss with broken software updates.

[tredre3]

The full list of what's available in trixie-backports, if anyone is curious: https://backports.debian.org/uploads/trixie-backports/

[teo_zero]

> (granted, all AMD for compatibility)

I get that you mean that AMD is more compatible than... what? Intel? Arm?

[zargon]

Nvidia, I think? That's what people say but has never been my experience.

[sharts]

Debian unstable/testing? Is quite good too. As well as OpenSUSE.

[jinnko]

Check out FastFlowLM for AMD NPU support.

[irishcoffee]

I’ll never understand why people like Ubuntu. It’s a really hard toss up for me if I’d rather be stuck with Ubuntu or windows.

[pmontra]

Probably because it got popular as the easy Linux distro back in the 2000s and that label is sticking.

I remember that I attempted to install Debian on my laptop in 2009. It was ugly. I installed Ubuntu 8.04 and it was a totally different and much nicer experience. Because of that I've been on Ubuntu until they started pushing snaps very aggressively. I live booted Debian 11 and realized that its UI was exactly the same. I don't know when it happened during that dozen of years but there wasn't anymore a reason to stick to Ubuntu. I installed Debian 11 and got a faster machine with less background processes. I'm on Debian 13 now. I've been told that KDE is much better than what I attempted to use in 2014 so maybe I could give it a try, but it's unclear to me what I have to gain.

[robertlagrant]

I prefer KDE (on Ubuntu, because I tried it and it's good enough) - it's got more stuff built into the OS in terms of settings. I tended to find that Gnome needs you to install more things to expose configuration settings, whereas KDE's configuration UI is pretty good.

[arcade79]

For me, it was kubuntu. Back in late 2005 or early 2006. The reason? They were always pretty good at shipping the latest KDE. I had grown tired of hoping someone would compile a new version for my preferred distro.

So kubuntu it was, and has been ever since. I'm currently looking into whether I should change to something else - as I've started growing tired of Ubuntu/Kubuntu after some 20 odd years.

[fhdkweig]

I'm of the belief that the more popular an OS is, the more maintainers it will have (and thus less bugs). The only thing about Ubuntu that I hated was its choice of windowing manager. That's why there are so many variants like KUbuntu, XUbuntu, etc. Are there other reasons to not like Ubuntu other than the windowing manager?

[fn-mote]

> Are there other reasons to not like Ubuntu other than the windowing manager?

Snap applications are still not “equal enough” to installed apps.

They have gotten better, but it’s not seamless and when you get burned it’s 2 hours debugging. Each time.

An app I use/help maintain regularly gets bug reports about sandboxed behavior. It’s understandable but the easiest fix is to install an unsandboxed version.

I personally have some extra steps in my workflow for printing from a snap application because it doesn’t just work and I don’t want to spend the hours needed to debug it.

[Jedd]

Ubuntu offered a slightly prettier installation experience.

Sure, no matter which distro you were installing you still had to provide a hostname, a domain name, some IP info (maybe), and an opinion on partitioning - there's only so many ways to ask the user these questions - but the ubuntu installer was prettier.

Around the time it was gaining popularity, almost every 'reviewer' (blogger) seemed to waste about 85% of their distro reviews talking about the installer - as though this was somehow important. The big sell of Debian, and Debian-derivatives, is that you install once, and then it's just in-place upgrades forever. The distro-hoppers, Microsoft evacuees, content-creators, etc - didn't really get that.

Anyway, once Ubuntu was installed it was much the same to operate as a Debian box. Obviously there were some surprising differences. Unity. Mir. One Cloud. Wubi. Upstart. Bazaar.

[fn-mote]

Come on - at least make one substantive criticism in your post putting down Ubuntu.

I came to Ubuntu because Wine worked on it with no effort. Yes, this was a long time ago. I have certainly cursed some of their changes since then, but I don’t want to spend my time doing yet another sysadmin job, so the less I change the better.

[irishcoffee]

Well, it starts with when I have to opt out of location services during install, and Ubuntu reserving usernames (admin, for example) and ends with how aggressively they shut down upstream repos… if they’re not being DDoSd. Package conflicts are miserable, so they tried to paper over it, adding yet another bullshit layer of things to debug when something invariably breaks.

I’d rather flip the question back on you, how is Ubuntu better than, say, Rocky? If you say “upgrading is easier” I’ll chuckle for the rest of the day.

[hurtigioll]

what doesn't just work in Ubuntu, compared with Debian?