I’ve been using Debian on servers for 20+ years, but ended up using Fedora on my desktop and laptop.
Debian is stable, meaning it doesn’t change often. Packages don’t get major version upgrades during the lifetime of a Debian release. That’s fantastic on servers, but can be annoying on clients since you don’t get the very latest drivers, the newest version of KDE, etc. Linux drivers move pretty quickly, especially for newer hardware.
You can run Debian testing, which is a more up-to-date development branch, but you need to make sure you pull security updates from unstable as the security team do not upload to testing. https://github.com/khimaros/debian-hybrid
If you’re new to Linux, then also consider Linux Mint Debian Edition.
I’m literally the opposite. I have been on Red Hat since Halloween and all servers I have ever touched have been Red Hat or a close fork of RHEL. When I decided to go Linux for my daily driver and more self hosting I went Pop!_OS on my laptop, Linux Mint for my wife, and Linux Mint Debian Edition for all my home systems.
I have to use Fedora at work (or Windows 11 or MacOS). All our production systems are CentOS, so the supported client Linux distro is Fedora, as they can reuse a bunch of scripts, Chef recipes, etc.
I liked it enough that I started using it at home. I like using the same OS on both work and personal systems. I share scripts and dotfiles between them.
I realize that’s it’s completely irrational, but I hate the name Pop!_OS, such that it may have kept me from checking it out to-date! I think it’s so stupid. And why does it need the exclamation mark?? But maybe I should look into it…
Personal anecdote - a year ago I switched my Framework laptop from Ubuntu to Debian, on ZFS, and it’s been smooth sailing. The kernel is surprisingly new.
I was having all sorts of IO issues because a few shitty HDD cables, and the worst of the observed behavior was some hiccups and freezes sometimes. Hundreds of IO errors, and it was barely sometimes maybe having a pause…
After switching a bunch of cables around and re-scrubbing a few times, I’ve now had zero IO errors for months, and zero OS issues.
I’d hate to think how nasty things would’ve gotten and would still be if those hundreds and hundreds of IO errors were stacking up this whole time.
Been uasing ZFS with USB drives since 2019 or so. On Raspberry Pi 4, then on real computers. My laptop is on a single SSD. ZFS is the only reason I figured I have RAM issues two years ago. No errors would show up on a couple of passes of Memtest86+.
I genuinely do not remember how it acts with one or few devices, but I wouldn’t be shocked to hear the magic extends past replacing raid arrangements or other multi-HDD setups.
This is why I use MX, it is Debian based, but always up to date, for instance I have kernel 6.18.6. Firefox is always the latest a few hours after release, and always in .deb, no flatpak. MX has a couple of their utilities that are useful to setup your system too.
The disclaimer is I haven’t tried too many of the shiny new distros to compare to, but compared to RHEL and Manjaro (ugh), Ubuntu, Mint, and a few other ‘traditional’ choices, MX has been crazy easy to setup and use.
The one thing that hasn’t “just worked” is a USB4 dock that kinda’ works like extra PCIe lanes (it’s just how that style of dock works), which of course the OS is going to freak out if a few PCIe devices suddenly disappear when unplugged. It’s not exactly a hot-swappable protocol!
I’d like to know how to get it working flawlessly, but everything else has been great.
I’ve been using Debian on servers for 20+ years, but ended up using Fedora on my desktop and laptop.
Debian is stable, meaning it doesn’t change often. Packages don’t get major version upgrades during the lifetime of a Debian release. That’s fantastic on servers, but can be annoying on clients since you don’t get the very latest drivers, the newest version of KDE, etc. Linux drivers move pretty quickly, especially for newer hardware.
You can run Debian
testing, which is a more up-to-date development branch, but you need to make sure you pull security updates fromunstableas the security team do not upload totesting. https://github.com/khimaros/debian-hybridIf you’re new to Linux, then also consider Linux Mint Debian Edition.
I just run sid (unstable) on my desktop. Still very rare to get a broken package, and when it happens it gets fixed within hours.
I’m literally the opposite. I have been on Red Hat since Halloween and all servers I have ever touched have been Red Hat or a close fork of RHEL. When I decided to go Linux for my daily driver and more self hosting I went Pop!_OS on my laptop, Linux Mint for my wife, and Linux Mint Debian Edition for all my home systems.
Red Hat is for work. Debian is for life.
I have to use Fedora at work (or Windows 11 or MacOS). All our production systems are CentOS, so the supported client Linux distro is Fedora, as they can reuse a bunch of scripts, Chef recipes, etc.
I liked it enough that I started using it at home. I like using the same OS on both work and personal systems. I share scripts and dotfiles between them.
Corporations refer to this as work-life balance.
I realize that’s it’s completely irrational, but I hate the name Pop!_OS, such that it may have kept me from checking it out to-date! I think it’s so stupid. And why does it need the exclamation mark?? But maybe I should look into it…
I actually do not recommend it at the moment. They are working on their new DE (Cosmic) so the current stable release is very old.
They have released a newer version with COSMIC as the default DE
How is cosmic? My Pop system is my main system, so I need to be cautious.
It is pretty polished to be daily driven. However you might miss some more features in settings and such if you’re coming from something like KDE.
Personal anecdote - a year ago I switched my Framework laptop from Ubuntu to Debian, on ZFS, and it’s been smooth sailing. The kernel is surprisingly new.
ZFS is magic if you have enough storage devices.
I was having all sorts of IO issues because a few shitty HDD cables, and the worst of the observed behavior was some hiccups and freezes sometimes. Hundreds of IO errors, and it was barely sometimes maybe having a pause…
After switching a bunch of cables around and re-scrubbing a few times, I’ve now had zero IO errors for months, and zero OS issues.
I’d hate to think how nasty things would’ve gotten and would still be if those hundreds and hundreds of IO errors were stacking up this whole time.
Been uasing ZFS with USB drives since 2019 or so. On Raspberry Pi 4, then on real computers. My laptop is on a single SSD. ZFS is the only reason I figured I have RAM issues two years ago. No errors would show up on a couple of passes of Memtest86+.
I genuinely do not remember how it acts with one or few devices, but I wouldn’t be shocked to hear the magic extends past replacing raid arrangements or other multi-HDD setups.
This is why I use MX, it is Debian based, but always up to date, for instance I have kernel 6.18.6. Firefox is always the latest a few hours after release, and always in .deb, no flatpak. MX has a couple of their utilities that are useful to setup your system too.
Recently tried MX and definitely +1.
The disclaimer is I haven’t tried too many of the shiny new distros to compare to, but compared to RHEL and Manjaro (ugh), Ubuntu, Mint, and a few other ‘traditional’ choices, MX has been crazy easy to setup and use.
The one thing that hasn’t “just worked” is a USB4 dock that kinda’ works like extra PCIe lanes (it’s just how that style of dock works), which of course the OS is going to freak out if a few PCIe devices suddenly disappear when unplugged. It’s not exactly a hot-swappable protocol!
I’d like to know how to get it working flawlessly, but everything else has been great.