But if I’m not able to update constantly, how else will I get the dopamine hits from watching the numbers go up?

I use Debian for my desktop, and 100% think others should, too.

I recommend Linux Mint Debian Edition to anybody who will listen

Because it is barebones. New users need a distro to be configured for them to reasonable defaults.

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.

I’ll give you an example:

I tried to run an old videogame through plain wine. On ZorinOS it ran out of the box no questions attached. On Debian I had to install wine and go through a few hiccups and issues. An average user shouldn’t go crazy when the command like says something incomprehensible

I like using Debian stable because I don’t like being bothered every ten minutes about updates. I need a newer version of something I install a Flatpak.

I daily drive Debian stable for the last 3 years now. I started using it because I develop software that runs on Debian so it was easier to not worry about library dependencies. I never had a problem with “outdated” software. It just works as a computer should. You have no idea what version software you run unless you need a specific feature in a later version. I don’t want to play around with my work machine, I have other devices to do that. It is an amazing distro (that many others build upon), as many other distros also are. I recommend it constantly.

I spent most of last year running LMDE6 and while it started off good, things just got more frustrating to troubleshoot and the system felt buggier over time. (Which I know is not how things are supposed to be for “stable” Debian.) Switched to CachyOS a couple months ago and things work so much smoother.

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.

And why is Ubuntu server even a thing, often recommended? Debian is this but without a second-party repository.

Edit: right, services, contracts.

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

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 is meant to be stable and ancient, it’s for servers