As the designer of the Debian logo I approve of this :-)
This is all the validation I need
Take away nostalgia and there’s little reason to pick Debian over other distros
What? Its super stable, super easy to install, and makes it easy to run purely free software, and contributing to it contributes to all downstream distros
You can sorta say that about most popular distros though
Only sort of and not fully though.
A quick run through of some popular distros and reasons you might pick Debian instead of them
- Ubuntu - directed fully by a for profit corporation, might at any time go the way of RHEL (Linux Mint already has a mint spin based on Debian in case Canonical shits the bed). Narrower impact on downstream code bases than Debian (though only barely). Ships by default with non free blobs that you must opt out of.
- Linux mint - very narrow downstream impact. Not as flexible for how you can set it up as Debian (switching desktop environments is strictly unrecommended, and there’s no real reason to run it as a server)
- Fedora - relationship with RedHat is concerning, stability is not there at all
- RHEL-alikes (Rocky, Alma, etc) - uncertain future, though it does look like SUSE is going to help stabilize them. Downstream impact is relatively narrow, though you’d be surprised
- Arch - harder to install, not as suitable for production environments for stability reasons
- Manjaro - horrible stability (worse than arch), not as flexible (like linux mint), holds security patches back, almost no downstream impact
- Slack - harder to install, package management is annoying
- Kali - not for installing on your machine
- Gentoo - see arch
- MX Linux - a little more flexible than Mint, but otherwise, see mint
What about openSUSE???
openSUSE Tumbleweed is basically Arch with a Control Panel and an enterprise backing.
And automatic QA testing insuring a higher level of stability compared to arch. Good defaults with byrfs and snapper out of the box too.
My first was Mint but i installed (as second boot) Open Suse to try it out, sticked with mint for the most part but i and some friends also run a custom Distro for a Server (its Debian Based)
Mint is just a Workhorse that never failed me. And once you settled you won’t adapt to something different easily.
Its just so simple. I see people complaining about getting Nvidia drivers to work on Linux, with Mint it takes like two clicks.
