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in Debian (because Debian was always mentioned as a distro good for servers, or stable machines that are ok with outdated software)

And while I get that Debian does have software that isn’t as up to date, I’ve never felt that the software was that outdated.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?

  • dan@upvote.au
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    2 days ago

    In the context of Debian, “stable” means it doesn’t change often. Debian stable doesn’t have major version changes within a particular release.

    Unstable has major changes all the time, hence the name.

    I think testing is a good middle ground. Packages are migrated from unstable to testing after ~10 days of being in unstable, if no major bugs are found.