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Comment by testmasterflex | Hacker News Reader

What’s the best alternative to Ubuntu? Debian?

Depends what you're looking for. If you're used to Ubuntu you'll find Debian to be similar: just a less-polished, less-branded UI and maybe slightly older (perhaps more stable) packages.

You might also like Fedora as a pretty mainstream, up to date desktop distro, but under the hood you'll find more differences like rpm instead of apt.

edit: I'd add that Linux distros are complicated: the issue in this article is hardly a reason to leave Ubuntu if it's otherwise working well for you.

Don't use Debian stable for desktop. Debian testing or unstable is a much better option.

I have found the one big feature of Ubuntu that I miss in Debian is PPAs. Other than that it's largely the same. Configuring the system requires more file editing and command line work than I remember with Ubuntu, but the documentation helps quite a bit.

EDIT: By default, non-free drivers are placed in a separate repository, and receive less support. In my case the biggest pain has been Nvidia drivers. I needed a cheap card to drive an HDMI display and all they had at the store was a GT710. That meant installing the proprietary drivers, since the free alternative had poor performance last time I checked. Every few updates it breaks, and I need to reinstall it and sign the kernel module each time. That is something to watch out for if you switch over.

On the matter of PPAs, these days I find that most of the things I used to use third party repos for I can now get as flatpaks from flathub. Really helped cut down on how many third party repos I'm using.

I'm not sure why this got downvoted. It is a very high-signal comment.

Yes, no PPAs but enough third party repos available.

OpenSUSE is the one I landed on, and it's been great.

I keep hearing high praise about Manjaro too, that it's solid, fast, and newbie-friendly; but I haven't tried it out myself yet.

Manjaro is too bleeding edge for most people. I don't think it's a good idea unless you are quite experienced with linux and like fixing things. It's great IF you need bleeding edge though, and seems okay enough for a daily driver if all you do is browsing, zoom, and email.

Oh yes! OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has been really excellent. It’s very polished and quite an easy thing to set up.

I used Debian for years, it is stable and has very few surprises. Ubuntu is a clone of Debian and can be a bit buggy. That been said Ubuntu is great for trying new things. Probably my favourite distro of late is Fedora, works well, the s/w packaging system is stable and quite user friendly. My advice is try them all. Oh and FreeBSD.

Debian is usually a great and pretty stable ecosystem choice. Also APT makes it easy to manage third party repositories (package pinning).

One big advantage I see with other distributions is that the release support cycles are longer (5y+).

But it will greatly depend on your usage, we are pretty happy with Debian running on somewhat 300+ machines.

FreeBSD.

There is a mess of things wrong with the linux ecosystem and a lot of it comes down to packaging systems and package management. Once you get over a little learning curve, working with FreeBSD is a breath of fresh air.

It’s a little hard to believe that any BSD is a drop in replacement for most use cases.

For sure there are some narrow cases where it is, but Linux just supports sooo much more

It might strain your imagination, but go look at everything available in ports, and also the linux compatibility layer.

I wouldn't call it a universal drop-in replacement, you can indeed do a whole lot with FreeBSD that you can do with a linux box.

Depends on your needs. Is it desktop? Is it server? Is it container base? If there any specific software/hardware you rely on? Etc. There's no "best alternative".

For desktop use, check out Mint.

openSUSE

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