Taking this opportunity to personally thank you for making a good logo, I absolutely love the Debian swirl! There are so many boring geometric or single-letter logos out there, the details and texture of the swirl is just so good.
Simple and recognizable. Exactly what a logo is supposed to be. I think it's the best logo in all of OSS. Basically the Nike swoosh of OSS, everyone else has to put the name of the software on the logo so people will know what it is. But you see the swirl, and you instantly know it's Debian without any explanation.
It was tied to magic smoke! But a different of kind. The original requirements called for two logos, one for restricted use, and one for general use. The one that’s being used for general use now was meant to be only for restricted use. The original had a genie bottle from which the swirl came out, the concept was that something very powerful had been unleashed onto the world, free of charge, that stood to change the world. I was inspired by Neil Stephenson’s story The Hole Hawg of Operating Systems - Unix.
tried it but I quite like how mint looks so I tried it with cinnamon and god default cinnamon is ugly and I dunno how to get all the mint theming so that was a deal breaker for me
Apparently you didnt read about the update process.
What you do in debian is simply beautiful:
You rock stable and once a newer package is required, you install from backports.
When a the package goes to a next stable version, you can remove the backports. It will transition automagically.
I started my whole Linux experience with Ubuntu 6.10. IIRC Compiz Fusion or Beryl was the shit back then with the 3D cube effect and the windows going off in flames when you close something.
Ubuntu was a fantastic distribution to start early on. Especially in the pre-10.x days there weren't many beginner friendly ones. Your alternatives were Debian with very outdated software, SuSE which was kind of OK, Fedora which was also quite unstable and lacking packages (remember hunting RPMs on the old RPMfusion?) or Ubuntu. At some point I'd outgrown Ubuntu and moved on to greener pastures. Nowadays I'm not sure I'd be recommending Ubuntu to new users, Fedora is quite good and without all the snap store shenanigans. Even Debian installation experience is not too bad and it's not lacking too much in software.
The other distro I tried out was openSuSE, but idk which version. It was shipped with KDE3 or 3.5, and man, I loved it. RPMs and YaST was something to get used to, especially after Ubuntu and I was like... 15-16 yeara old, barely just into Linux land so broke the shit out of them pretty regularly. But I learned a lot.
Then KDE4 and Plasma came out and I hated every pixel of it.
Honestly, I'm starting to appreciate the "Just works" mentality a little more as I start to shy away from ricing. I'm going to stick with non-systemd distributions, but my DE will likely be cinnamon next, since it's easy to use and I don't care about making it look pretty.
I feel Void + a simple DE is an amazing combination for people who want to get work done without paying too much of attention to the OS, except the part of the OS they are using actively (tooling + applications)
Why non-systemd distros? I have heard of not-systemd distros like Artix and Devaun (I think that's how you spell them), but I never bothered looking into why some people prefer them.
Systemd is easier but also slower, it dose a lot more than just a init system and many dislike that. I have used both and it's cool to see E.g. PostmarketOS boot but systemd works really well nowdays too and the actual backlash is mostly from it's early days.
It's philosophical: I want an init system, not a gargantuan binary blob that does who knows what and apparently removing it breaks completely unrelated parts of my system just because this little shit seems to have a hand in its operation
Ubuntu is based on Debian Testing (their beta pipeline) and run by a for profit corporation. Ubuntu makes significant changes to Debian to get it to where its easy to use for end users. It has in the past made choices that were extremely unpopular in the open source community, and will make those decisions again in the future.
Never much liked ubuntu but admittedly, they did a lot for userfriendliness in the Linux space and a lot of great beginner (or people who don’t want to deal with stuff not working) friendly distros like mint, pop, etc are based on it, oftentimes debullshittet (e.g. neither use snap by default)
I would liken it to more like if Debian was a shot of whiskey, Ubuntu is like a whiskey sour. It still has whiskey as a base but enough ingredients have been added and changes have been made that it's its own thing.
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.
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
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.