Title pretty much says it all. I’ve been using ubuntu as my daily driver for the last 5 years or so and honestly, I’ve had a wonderful experience with it.
That said, with the way things are going, I feel like its only a matter of time before Canonical pulls the rug out so I’d like to at least get my feet wet with something other than Ubuntu and Debian seems like the logical choice.
I mainly use my machines for gaming, self hosting, programming, and weird networking projects/automation testing.
I’ve heard gaming on debian isnt as ‘out of the box’ as it is with Ubuntu. So I’m hoping somone with more experience can share some tips on what I should be looking out for or point me to some good guides. Thanks yall.
EDIT: I fucking love this community. Thank you all for your replies. I appreciate you taking the time to help me out.
Switch to Fedora I would say. Debian is up to date currently, as things are settling down to be LTS, but over the years it will get fewer updates. Fedora is even more up to date than Ubuntu, but more stable than Opensuse Tumbleweed, which would be the Opensuse equivalent.
If you want a perfect experience with KDE, I dont know what to recommend but there are bugs that will probably simply not be fixed in Debian for the next 2 years, as they are postponed to Plasma 6, mainly the glitches when fractional scaling.
Gnome is really stable I think, Fedora should give the best experience here.
Btw using Distrobox you can run ANY Linux app easily. On Fedora Kinoite (ostree, like Silverblue) I run the VLC 4.0 beta currently, which is only available as an Ubuntu PPA. no problem at all. Do mainly for AUR or Ubuntu PPA apps Distrobox is brilliant.
Fedora itself also has COPR where lots of community packages are.
If you want recent deb-based, there also is KDE Neon user edition. Used that for a while, but I switched to immutable Fedora and never going back.
Fedora is fantastic, but I’m a little shaken about Redhat, which is downstream of Fedora and a big supported.
Also, Fedora is a bit annoying with codecs and non-free software in general. They are extremely anal about not infringing copyright.
I’ve done my share of distro hopping and I must agree with [email protected].
Fedora has the near perfect balance of being stable and always up to date. I found the codecs and non-free software to be a non-issue. You enable the RPM Fusion repos and install then like anything else.
Someone familiar with Ubuntu is going to have no trouble at all with Debian.
As for updates, there’s always upgrading releases, or Testing/Unstable.
Okay true, there is Debian testing aka sid. I have not tried that long term though.
But I absolutely dont agree “being used to ubuntu”. Either you are a GUI person and the interface is not the same. Its GNOME and you need some extensions, thats it.
Or you are from Ubuntu and want proprietary packages, PPAs, or even Snaps! They seem pretty user friendly witg some features.
Or you want the nice background…
But apt? You just use
sudo dnf upgrade" instead of
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade`. The rest is Linux, everything is probably the same. Maybe some udev stuff, but apart from ADB (which is kinda poweruser stuff) its not actually needed.