I was always a little confused by how popular Ubuntu became. Canonical never did much to add value, often replacing more standard tools with strange canonical replacements that didn't survive the test of time.
If you use Ubuntu now, give Debian a try. The stability and community are really second to none. For all my personal use I run Arch, but I would not hesitate to run Debian in production instead of a commercial distribution.
By comparison I never fully understood the Debian versioning story. I have no idea when the next version will become stable, or how stale the versions are in stable, whether I could install it without driver issues on my desktop, etc.
With Ubuntu I could take a break for a few years and know there will be an LTS release in April or 2022, that the previous LTS release was 20.04, and 18.04 was the one before that, etc. That each will be supported for 5 years and so on.
When I started using Linux a couple decades ago, "we ship when it's ready" was the dominant FOSS approach, and I thought it was the most sensible approach.
Then I got my first job and experienced the realities of enterprise support and planning. Today I wish more projects were as predictable as Ubuntu, and I'm gratefully for every one that is.
Ubuntu is far from my favorite distro technically, but the predictability of its LTS releases makes it my recommendation for most uses.
I think if debian augmented the toy story names with dates, that might help.
Before that I was on FreeBSD, and before that I was in Slackware. All were always fine
What does “difficult to install” even mean?
Besides, last time I ran a GUI on linux was probably over 20 years ago.
Stable is too stable for the average desktop user - often kernel is missing drivers for newer hardware models, or system libraries are too old for newer applications.
Testing works most of the time but is not stable enough. Most recent example; zfs, which is on 0.8.x, is completely broken in testing since the kernel upgrade to 5.10 in December. zfs has not (and prob will not) backported 5.10 compatibility to 0.8.x. Last I heard, the Debian maintainers were still not decided on if they are going to backport the 5.10 fix to their own fork of zfs 0.8.x, or if they're going to do the upgrade to zfs 2.0 already.
I had a couple of servers where I had stupidly enabled unattended-upgrades, which broke the filesystems and required recovery to make services start again. Annoying, but it was my mistake.
This kind of situation is completely expected and there's really no one at fault. But it is a good example of why vanilla Debian is not suitable for many users and use-cases. Mint does seem like a better Ubuntu, though.
They do not have the time and resources to figure out every inevitable configuration, and they end up supporting a mishmash of unsupportable software.
Backported ZFS just brings fear in my eyes, these filesystems have to have many decades of testing before people are comfortable with it, and Debian finds it acceptable to make a custom patched version. Not cool.
If you want to store all your data on that configuration then by all means, but I'm afraid I won't run a distro that plays games to avoid changing a version number.
> the backporting part was just hearsay that it was under debate
I guess if it is just hearsay then thats something else. Does Debian have guidelines about what they wouldn't backport?
They employ a number of people who maintain core Debian packages to work on Debian packaging full time and generally to land improvements in Debian.
I do agree that Canonical never did much to add value to Ubuntu beyond what they added to Debian, but they certainly added value to Debian, and ironically you don't even need use their distro for that, let alone pay them!
Second, it would be nice if the package manager had an actual database behind it capturing everything that the rpmdb does. Instead you have a flat file with some of the data in it, and log files with other data (where the log files can be rotated out eventually). I want to be able to do things like "rpm -qa --last" on Debian. Or "yum history".
How difficult would it be to write a version of the apt suite of tools that uses an sqlite db? Would that break other items in Debian? It sounds like an interesting project to take on.
I wish Linus had veto'd the binary logfiles of systemd.
https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/RoadMap https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/Spec/MetadataTracking
Personally I vastly prefer the flat file version, it is much easier to inspect and modify and maybe less likely to get corrupted.