There hasn't been a good reason to use Ubuntu over Debian for years.
Many Ubuntu 3rd party repos have no Debian equivalent. But there are more Debian repos than before.
It just works. It's stable, I don't need to worry about breaking updates and changes anymore. I'm at peace for at least 2 years.
And all the software I care about have their own deb repos or are self updating (Firefox, Chrome, VS Code, Cursor, Signal, Slack, etc), so I always have up-to-date versions. There is flatpak as well but I really didn't have any need for it for now.
It's the best combo, stable unchanging base and up-to-date apps.
This way, you can also have a rolling distro.
$ stat / | grep "Birth" | sed 's/Birth: //g' | cut -b 2-11
2020-06-20
$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.sources
# Modernized from /etc/apt/sources.list
Types: deb deb-src
URIs: http://deb.debian.org/debian/
Suites: unstable
Components: main non-free contrib
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-keyring.gpg
# Modernized from /etc/apt/sources.list
Types: deb
URIs: http://deb.debian.org/debian/
Suites: testing
Components: main non-free non-free-firmware contrib
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-keyring.gpg
stat / | awk '/Birth:/ { print $2; }'
A long time ago I ran stable, and pinned testing at low priority.
Across the decades I've slowly upgraded my stance. Now my machines run Debian Unstable, with testing and experimental pinned at very low priorities. Unstable does sometimes have unsatisfiable dependencies, so it's good to have some other options. And sometimes I just want what's coming for a specific package or kernel, and experimental will often be there.
Coming back to a hobby laptop and finding it unable to function because mirrors have been updated or whatever was a really painful thing to find out after a few months away.
However, bumping every three months always renders my configuration broken because of some expression being deprecated. One time it was how pulseaudio got enabled. Last it was how nerdfonts were organised.
I like how nixpkgs gets better. I don’t like thinking “I guess I’m not upgrading packages tonight, I’ll just roll back.”
That might have been due to a bug in some issue that you would have to fix under Mint as well.
> It has always been something simple, even less issues than debian, plus other advantages. Again, that is my experience.
Sure, that's fine, I still don't think it makes sense to put down a distro because you were messing with things you shouldn't have been. If you said you had to, then that's different from messing with something you shouldn't have been, since you should have been to fix it.
It seems the real issue was not that you were messing with something you shouldn't have been, bur rather stuff was not working for you as well out of the box.
IIRC it was when an Ubuntu update pushed the Unity DE on me that I abandoned it. And that would have been back in like 2012 or 2013 ish.
The reason I use Linux in the first place is because I know what I'm going to get. There may be a few UI tweaks between Mint MATE versions, but there's rarely breaking changes that completely and fundamentally alter the way that I'm meant to be interacting with my machine. As an end user I want stability in all things. Don't move menus or change keyboard shortcuts (and especially don't change the entire freakin' DE) without making a massive fuss that this "upgrade" might not be for all users with an option to .
In any case, Mint MATE gives me the compromise that I want between a smooth and "pretty" user interface that looks relatively modern without being a heavy resource hog like other DEs that strive for that (cough KDE cough).
There is also a Debian edition of Mint called LMDE. I would recommend Debian second and I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu at all, mostly because of the SNAPs but also because they really gave up trying to provide a good desktop experience when they stopped Unity many years ago now.
Does that really make a difference? From a user perspective it's only replacing apt-get install by dnf install or pacman -S or apk add
This is up to the repository. If Debian choose RPM it would be as large as it already is
I thought redhat distros later introduced yum as the "apt" equivalent?
Everyone says this about their favorite package manager.
The people moving OSes in response to Snap presumably have strong opinions on package managers :)
But also no: even if they spent years catching up they would not reach the level of not-sucking that .deb get without extra effort, as a result of decades of policy ossified into the supporting tools. Such as the strong expectation that apt deals with packages that can be (re)built from their declared inputs and share common build-essentials. Whereas snapcraft does not even provide the tools yet to easily rule out building from ephemeral inputs or merely-accidentally working rust versions.
I use Bodhi Linux but, besides the Desktop, this is bascially Ubuntu.
On a server we use nala instead, it's quite nice actually, so maybe I'll start using it elsewhere too.
The primary difference between apt and apt-get is apt has better dependency resolution and apt cleans up after itself when you do upgrades (it uninstalls packages that are no longer used).
With apt you don't have to use two separate tools to search for packages to install them. That's probably at least a moderate usability improvement for many people since you don't have to figure out whether you need to use apt-get or apt-cache for some particular command.
I'm more and more disappointed that packages are snaps and not directly installed via apt, myself.
if the issue with the current stable version of debian are certain packages - like the kernel -, try debian backports
* https://backports.debian.org/
they have a list of available packages at
* https://packages.debian.org/bookworm-backports/
ps. yes, using testing is another possibility, but for serious systems i personally prefer the "stable" release :))
just my 0.02€
Huh. I didn't notice that in my personal experience. And with Fedora I at least get recent versions of software.