I distro hopped for a bit before finally settling in Debian (because Debian was always mentioned as a distro good for servers, or stable machines that are ok with outdated software)
And while I get that Debian does have software that isn’t as up to date, I’ve never felt that the software was that outdated. Before landing on Debian, I always ran into small hiccups that caused me issues as a new Linux user - but when I finally switched over to Debian, everything just worked! Especially now with Debian 13.
So my question is: why does Debian always get dismissed as inferior for everyday drivers, and instead mint, Ubuntu, or even Zorin get recommended? Is there something I am missing, or does it really just come down to people not wanting software that isn’t “cutting edge” release?
For desktop use debian sucks. I dont want to wait a year to update my apps. For servers its fine. Arch and Nix are my favorite rn and im looking to convert my home media server into Nix soon.
In my opinion, Debian is best for small, specific purposes that don’t change much over time. I used Debian for a bit as a home PC, mostly for making music with bitwig and gaming on steam as well as freetube/media consumption.
I had trouble with apps having conflicts, and combined with an nvidia card, the experience got worse over time and I had to separate my system into different bootable linux systems on the same drive, one distro for gaming and one for music. Some apps were deb files, some were apt, some were direct from websites and others immutable type apps, a mess.
Eventually I tried Arch based systems and liked how unified pacman is and how there are meta-packages full of music and RT. Then moved to Cachyos because it is just so much less annoying that vanilla Arch maintenance for me. I also used endeavorOS for a while, but at one point started having endless crashes from that distro across 2 different PCs (some black screen video issue with nvidia GPU).
As to how that applies to what I would recommend:
I think Debian is good at specific use-cases, but poor as an everyday home PC imo. Also, Debian is so barebones that things like a firewall aren’t pre-configured, which makes it more of an intermediate distro that seems easy on first glance.
I wouldn’t recommend Ubuntu personally, because the last few times I have tried it I found it buggy and I don’t like snaps. But there are so many Debian derivative distros that in some cases Ubuntu is the best option, for example, Ubuntu Studio is actually pretty nice for quickly making creative content. There also Ubuntu distros pre-configured for other purposes.
Linux Mint seems to have outdated packages, but overall decent for beginners because it is a debian/ubuntu sub-distro that has a lot of polish and is really good at hardware detection on installation. I also think the linux mint DE is pretty good for new users.
debian is meant to be stable and ancient, it’s for servers
It works a treat on old laptops. I daily drive it on an old Latitude and it’s awesome
Debian unstable has entered the chat
Debian used to have quite old software before version 6.0 or so. Ever since then it’s been quite a good daily driver for workstations too.
Debian takes work, especially if you have tricky, proprietary hardware that requires firmware support. It comes with that magical “free software only” mentality that makes it harder to adopt and hence why Ubuntu and Mint exist. It’s a great minimalist distro
It comes with that magical “free software only” mentality
Less free than it used to be. Now you get closed source firmware by default, making the initial setup much better than it used to be.
Fedora har the same free software ethos. You can enable varies various not free repos, just like in debian. I doubt it’s a real problem? Might just have been lucky.
Fedora was the first to get my NVidia Card and proprietary wifi card working out of the box without intervening. It also updates my Dell firmware out of the box. Debian, last time I checked, does not. I haven’t tried since before Bullseye.
Similar to Debian but tangentally, I run Guix which falls under the same GNU umbrella of what “free software” is and I have to break that with non-free channels to get the same laptop running.
I’m running Debian 12 (Bookworm) on a Dell laptop and it updates my firmware out of the box as well. I’m not running any NVidia though, so I can’t comment on whether that’d work or not.
Once I installed Debian on an old eMMC weak netbook for a friend after trying about 6 other distros that all had some problem or another, including Mint and Xubunto. Debian worked flawlessly
I haven’t read through the other responses in the thread, but I don’t think it’s the slightly old software that’s the problem. I think it has more to do with using older kernels, meaning that the latest hardware won’t always be supported (on the stable branch at least - there’s always testing and unstable too of course which may have better hardware support).
That may have changed with recent releases though - I haven’t used Debian for several years now. But if your hardware is supported then it’s a pretty solid choice.
Some other people sometimes mention that Debian isn’t as beginner friendly as Ubuntu or Mint, but my experiences have been similar to yours - I found Debian to more user-friendly than Ubuntu for example. Assuming that the hardware works of course - if it doesn’t then it obviously is a worse choice.
I’ve been running debian sid on desktop for 4 years, I think. Yes, I don’t care if it breaks. I wanted to try debian and didn’t want to use old packages at that point. These days I don’t really need the latest things. I recently switched to testing - I only needed to replace a few words in a few files in /etc. I didn’t even need wiki or anything for that, because testing is almost like sid. If this doesn’t break on me majorly, I might not switch and just replace “testing” with “forky”. I’m really satisfied with debian.
Others already explained basically everything. I’d like to elaborate and offer a few examples to support them.
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On potential users:
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The people who look for distros to try are seen as newbies by linux users, and therefore are recommended newbie-friendly distros. Also, debian is conservative: it rarely offers shiny new things, so its desktop use isn’t high. There isn’t much to be excited about, so there are no hype cycles. The current “shiny new thing” in debian was the recent change in apt’s interface (now it formats its output into tables, for example), compare that to “atomic” distros. People often still use apt-get (it is in the guides for some reason) instead of apt so even this news in nothing to them.
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Furthermore, software development often happens with the latest libraries around. It’s often a great help that Arch ships the latest software. Debian doesn’t have that. While languages these days have their own package managers, having the latest devtools, editors, etc. to try out is harder to do on debian. Therefore, IT students and software engineers have better time on faster-moving distros. Debian is more for the sysops/sysadmin people ( you can leave it there on auto-update and not care for 2 or more years ). The above further restricts its appeal and userbase.
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Even further, Debian might be bigger than it seems, as others have pointed it out. Perceived marketshare is often based on desktop use. See EU OS’s FOSDEM presentation on how opensuse has a bigger company behind it than ubuntu.
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On “latest drivers”:
- It used be much harder to configure Debian. Recently ( think it was with Bullseye) I installed it on an old machine, and debian didn’t install the right wifi drivers by default. I think it also lacked the proper firmware. This changed only with Bookworm. Back in 2008, I also tried it on my pentium 3 I had then. Debian didn’t have ath5k at that time, and the ndiswrapper hack was harder to pull off for me than just using mandriva, or later, lubuntu and salix.
- I heard that these days, people expect linux to fully support their hardware on day1. They also expect it to just run on any new hardware they buy. Also, games often need the latest optimizations in drivers: it might just be the thing that pushes the fps count above 30, 60 or 120. They also that they want the driver bugfixes to come ASAP. Early on during a release cycle of a game, driver updates sometimes give big improvements. While using the latest drivers on debian is possible, and not too hard (Compiling a newer stock kernel is easy, even if it complies slowly. Mesa isn’t hard either. Still, these require knowledge of old & basic dev tools, and also new ones.), ubuntu offers new drivers to LTS kernels, they are called HWE. No idea how doable this on debian, I never needed such things.
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On “stability”:
- What people usually don’t think about it that there are different kinds of stabilities. Debian offers something like API stability, so that user-provided software on the same version of debian rarely - if ever - breaks. It’s not necessarily shipping the most stable software, but it has a guarantee that updates won’t break anything. Even a slight change can disqualify being included. This very slow process resulted in the old and famous xscreensaver vs debian drama. The abovementioned stability also applies to other distros, but to a lesser extent, I believe. Mostly due to the 2-year release cycle.
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On “ease of use”:
- Debian doesn’t have a user repo like AUR, so it isn’t as easy to install 3rd party stuff (I know, makedeb, flatpak, snap, pkgsrc, nix & guix exist), debian is so big that anybody providing packages will do it (to list a few examples: freetube, discord, librewolf, signal, Trinity DE, and there are bleeding edge emacs packages available).
- Debian has docs, but I often just use arch wiki or the gentoo wiki to figure out stuff. I can only do that because I understand the differences and the similarities. Newbies would have trouble with this. Also, ubuntu automatically configures a few things, like installing something with a systemd service also will enable that service. Debian doesn’t do that.
How bad is the situation with security updates in sid? This page shows a grim picture: https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/
Thanks for the thorough response :)
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As much as I’d like to recommend Debian, its release cycle really leaves a lot to be desired for pragmatic computer users.
Bugs stick around for years, and with each new release you get new bugs that won’t be fixed for years.
It could be better if the ecosystem had more support, but as it stands right now there are just better options for the desktop space.
It’s fine for servers because they have the resources to make sure server programs aren’t a buggy or featureless mess.
My laptop and dev box are Debian Trixie along with two home servers that are Debian Bookworm. My gaming computer is Debian Forky. Looking for the latest stable release to play games with, which is what most recommendations are for, will tell you to use Debian stable builds but stay away from Ubuntu LTS because they’re not up to date .
Forky (testing) is a great gaming distro with the latest drivers, but people are afraid it’s unstable (which is Debian Sid), so they choose to compare other distros to the last stable release while pushing Arch and the latest Ubuntu because Debian testing is too bleeding edge for what they think of Debian, which is supposed to be stable.
I disagree, the strong points of debian are the stability (long periods of testing, without new changes) and security (by applying security updates quickly).
Using testing or sid means to forego the strong points. At that point you are better served by other distros which focus on having newer packages.
Also i would be cautious about using Debian testing (forky).As far as i know its the worst in terms of security. Stable has security update priority over testing. And some people say even sid it’s better on that front by having even newer packages.
Disclaimer: I daily drive debian stable and game on it without hiccups. Rock solid. BUT i have 7 year old amd rig and the games are not demanding.
I understand and respect your opinion. I have new hardware though, a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and 9070XT GPU. I bought them a couple of weeks after release and needed drivers for them to “get my money’s worth” out of them. (CP2077 at 4k with 144hz was a must!) I needed the newer mesa drivers at the time, and this was pre-trixie, so I opted to use forky instead. I opted to not reinstall after trixie was released as I already had all of my stuff set up and configured. As far as security, package releases in deb go into sid for 10, 5, or 2 days for stability testing (depending on the urgency) before being pushed into forky, but the Debian security team does not work with either sid or forky. So, neither are really more or less secure than the other. Forky is just a teeny bit more “stable” than unstable.
I personally take a calculated risk, I understand the security implications and rely on other external network-based security measures, so probably feel a bit more confident than most users and am willing to take the risk more than others may. I also have submitted bugs and provide feedback to packages fairly often for both Debian and KDE while using both trixie and forky, which I feel is important for end-user usability. I’ve been using Debian for a long time and have tried to contribute back where I can.
I’ve been on Debian for over 20 years now, after a major issue with a LAMP server using Ubuntu Warthog and going to “the source” of Ubuntu to work out a few issues. I ended up converting all of my servers (Former SysAdmin) to Debian within a few weeks. After that, I moved from Slackware at home and Ubuntu at work to Debian everywhere and never looked back.
And why is Ubuntu server even a thing, often recommended?Debian is this but without a second-party repository.Edit: right, services, contracts.
10 years LTS. Shouldn’t really matter for home servers though.
I’ll be honest : because people is ignorant.
They tried Debian once few years ago, it didn’t have the exact driver they wanted out of the box, they gave up. They think that’s the normal and current experience.
Reality is I use Debian every day on my servers, SBCs, laptop but also my desktop. I’ve been gaming on it since the first day of the installation and it just worked. Sure I had to follow https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers and basically follow those steps. It took me maybe 15min and 1 reboot but since then NO tinkering, 0, and I’m gaming nearly daily from indie to AAA, from 2D to 3D to VR. As I mentioned in another reply sure I might not have perfectly optimized all my performance but I don’t give a shit, I’m just gaming!
Also as I mentioned elsewhere the “cutting edge” is bullshit. You can have a Debian installation, stable, and cherry pick the packages you want. Heck you can even pull from a forge the software you want, built it, run it. That’s how “bleeding edge” it can be. Of course you can use VM (with GPU passthrough), distrobox, AppImage, Nix (different from NixOS), etc so they are many many ways to make sure you use the absolute latest without breaking your system.
TL;DR: Debian does not position itself as a gaming distribution. A lot of gamers want to optimize everything for gaming and consequently assume a specialized distribution will do better. Meanwhile people who JUST want to play can definitely do so on Debian.
Hot take but totally agreed
I do debian on my servers (barring specific uses), arch on my desktop.
Yeah but ppa and apt are the worse of all the options. Other wise you right.
Fuck ppas horrid system.
I think it’s a reinforcing cycle. (I) Debian gets recommended less often for home use -> (II) less people become proficient in it -> (I)
My 2¢:
I think it’s gamer discourse bleeding out into other fields. Gamers need the newest libraries and the newest drivers or their stuff might not run as well as it possibly could, because gaming is a relatively young but aggressively growing field with the Linux ecosystem in general. Sure games have always been around, but it’s never been the focus.
Now that gamers are switching more frequently, and that the average user is likely to play a game occasionally, it’s becoming relatively important that packages be up to date for desktop workloads.
Doesn’t steam still ship Ubuntu 12.04 software libraries?
Considering games are the most intensive things most people will use their computer for, I think it’s fine to optimize for that use case and assume everything else will be “fine”
Gamers need the newest libraries and the newest drivers or their stuff might not run as well as it possibly could
No they don’t. They think they do because they believe they run their precious expensive hardware only at 99% whereas they imagine, I bet due to trying to compete with each others on benchmarks, that with the absolute latest driver they can actually push their GPU at 99.99% and gain .1FPS in the most popular game they might not even like and 2 points in the trendy benchmark.
Source : I’m a gamer playing on Debian, from indie to AAA, from 2D to 3D to VR, and it just works. Sure I’m not at 99% perf on my hardware, I might even be at 80% but I’m definitely spending 0% time tinkering and 100% having fun.
I’ve literally had to wait for fixes to hit new mesa versions to play newly released games. Having those packages be up to date is just going to be a better experience for people that care about that kind of stuff
Newer packages will in theory always be better, that doesn’t really matter which distribution or use case (gaming or not) one has.
Even if Debian were generating packages the second a pull request was accepted and making it available to everyone and any one it wouldn’t change that the next pull request would, in theory (without regression) be more up to date.
If people have to wait 1s or 1 year, for gaming or not, they can have fun.
If hardware is not properly supported though it’s a different issue. It means people need to buy hardware that is well supported. It’s not specific to a distribution.
I’m playing old and new games on the SteamDeck and it works even if I don’t update it. That’s how things should be, that’s how things already are.
Anecdotes, even if important personally of course, showing things don’t work in a specific context don’t make a trend. There are plenty of things that don’t work well on Debian but also on Arch, Mint, etc and of course on Windows too. It’s very annoying but I don’t see how that helps.
My example applied to all distros, the difference would be the time it takes that code change (which resolved a critical to me bug) takes to actually be available to use.
There’s also very little that’s specific to me about that, it’s a real use case that comes up repeatedly for new releases that tend to push things graphically. I’m only going to recommend distros that minimize the time to get those fixes because it’s a better user experience for the target demographic with little downside.
I’m sorry but I might be totally out of the loop here, do gamers use Mesa? I thought proprietary drives from NVIDIA and AMD, sadly, was what most people actually used nowadays. Again to be clear I’m NOT saying it’s a good thing (it’s not!) just wondering what’s the actual share of users relying on it.
Edit: oh, looks like Mesa is now the default for AMD “AMD promotes their Mesa drivers Radeon and RadeonSI over the deprecated AMD Catalyst” (via Wikipedia), then yes it’s a big deal. Still makes me wonder what’s the current share but mostly out of curiosity.
Mesa has been the defacto standard for AMD for years. It’s always performed better than the official driver. AMD just made it their official recommendation recently.
I think Intel also uses Mesa, with Nvidia being the odd one out
Nvidia being the odd one out
Right, I get that but also :
(Source Steam Hardware & Software Survey: January 2026 )
Entire top10, then for marketshare I don’t count NVIDIA I count the rest :
AMD : ~15%
Intel : ~6%
I’m too lazy to guesstimate when it’s below 0.5% but you get the idea, at least 75% is NVIDIA.
So “odd” yes but still a big deal in terms of market share for gamers.
To be clear though I am NOT advocating for NVIDIA (especially with all their AI BS) just showing how dominating they are in that segment.
With how frequently I have to wait on mesa updates, kernel updates and package updates to even hit my arch systems for functionality.
No fucking world exists where Debian with out a bunch of fucking around has 1/2 those fixes in reasonable time frame.
In fact I know they don’t cause I frequently have to put my Debian install aside to play various games because the fixes and packages required literally do not come fast enough.
you’re probably right as to why.
I’ll note that on my gaming desktop I decided to try out Debian instead of my usual choice of Fedora and its worked fine for gaming with latest gen CPU and GPU. I did install the steam flatpak which will have a newer version of Mesa. I think this is a good middle ground for a system you don’t want to mess with too much.
For reasons similar to why plain bread doesn’t show up in sandwich recommendations.
Plain bread is not a fair comparison, Debian is like an old familiar sandwich you keep going back to because it’s not fancy, it doesn’t use over the top ingredients so it digests very well.
That’s my take too… it’s certainly a soild choice, but not incredibly exciting.
boring is awesome if you need to just work all the time and for a long time.
That’s why I recommend it for non-technical users that just need something to browse the web, Debian will not disappoint them.
Also, GNOME is good for that. Many believe it has to look like Windows for less technical people, but people nowadays mostly are more used to Android than Windows, so having overview of open apps, a menu with shutdown and brightness and volume and sort of an app launcher seems quite natural to them.
Recently installed it for people that have never used Linux before and they immediately got it. One of the two struggles with writing emails and attaching files and things like that, but GNOME is simple for them.
Often simple solutions are the best, flashy solutions break and don’t give the stability that’s expected.
Debian is the absolute goat so long as your work flow fits inside of the scope of Debian which 99% of everybody’s well, even most regular normal gamers will do just fine in Debian using flat packs.
You just have to also accept the fact that if you’re doing something niche like VR gaming or using weird third-party custom hardware or something Debian sucks ass. A lot of my VR kit straight up doesn’t even support anything that uses apt.
It only supports Fedora and Arch. Because a lot of it straight up will not work with flat pack anything. There’s just no support and s*** brakes constantly. You need up-to-date libraries and some of these libraries update multiple times a week. It’s just not inside the scope of something like Debian.
Always try Debian first. If it doesn’t work then try something else. It’s usually the best rule of thumb.
agreed, Debian’s rock solid for 99.99% of people.
You just have to also accept the fact that if you’re doing something niche like VR gaming or using weird third-party custom hardware or something Debian sucks ass.
i’ve worked on predominantly debian based infrastructure professionally for multimedia companies in the last 10ish years, so it’s a little bit funny to me that og flavored debian doesn’t do this, but it clearly can if you can afford an army of developers to create it for you.
entire multi-billion dollar revenue streams literally exist because of debian doing this and doing it well, but everyone popularly and unquestioningly believe that you can’t do it on linux. lol
