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Take away nostalgia and there's little reason to pick Debian over other distros
Non of cannonical's bullshit, more barebones then mint, the only distro i know of where you can almost seemlessly move from stable release to rolling release and back without re-installing, very big software support due to proximity to ubuntu, big repositories, stable is stable AF, you know it will keep being supported for many more years, much more flexible then the DE based distroa like ElementryOS and DeepinOS.
I dont use debian nowadays but its frickin great.
What? Its super stable, super easy to install, and makes it easy to run purely free software, and contributing to it contributes to all downstream distros
You can sorta say that about most popular distros though
Only sort of and not fully though.
A quick run through of some popular distros and reasons you might pick Debian instead of them
- Ubuntu - directed fully by a for profit corporation, might at any time go the way of RHEL (Linux Mint already has a mint spin based on Debian in case Canonical shits the bed). Narrower impact on downstream code bases than Debian (though only barely). Ships by default with non free blobs that you must opt out of.
- Linux mint - very narrow downstream impact. Not as flexible for how you can set it up as Debian (switching desktop environments is strictly unrecommended, and there's no real reason to run it as a server)
- Fedora - relationship with RedHat is concerning, stability is not there at all
- RHEL-alikes (Rocky, Alma, etc) - uncertain future, though it does look like SUSE is going to help stabilize them. Downstream impact is relatively narrow, though you'd be surprised
- Arch - harder to install, not as suitable for production environments for stability reasons
- Manjaro - horrible stability (worse than arch), not as flexible (like linux mint), holds security patches back, almost no downstream impact
- Slack - harder to install, package management is annoying
- Kali - not for installing on your machine
- Gentoo - see arch
- MX Linux - a little more flexible than Mint, but otherwise, see mint
What about openSUSE???
openSUSE Tumbleweed is basically Arch with a Control Panel and an enterprise backing.
And automatic QA testing insuring a higher level of stability compared to arch. Good defaults with byrfs and snapper out of the box too.
What are your thoughts on PopOS?
I'm just now migrating to Debian after years and years mostly using Mint. I like apt and I want to get away from Ubuntu based distros. Why not go to the source? It's definitely a little rough around the edges compared to Mint, and I may well end up using LMDE once they update to Bookworm.
I'm on LMDE right now. Its pretty great. My only complaint is with Cinnamon being 2 minor versions behind I don't get meaningful touch gestures
That's cool. I think I'm going to do it. I'm so comfortable in Mint having used it forever. It's a bit of a chore configuring Debian to where I want it. I don't use a touchscreen, so that Cinnamon issue you have wouldn't bother me.