Debian Linux

★★★★☆

Debian isn’t my first choice Linux distribution for either desktop or servers, but it’s my second choice for both.

Upsides: More reliable than Ubuntu, easier to install than Arch, a more stable base than Fedora, more standard in its libraries than Alpine. Debian is one of the classic distros, and is the basis for multiple modern variations. And it runs on a wide range of hardware architectures, with first-tier support for ARM (both 32bit and aarch64), RISC-V, and more in addition to the more common x86_64.

Downsides: Slower to update software than Fedora or Arch, bigger than Alpine. Though the former can be mitigated using Flatpak or Snap (which have their own issues).

I still prefer Alpine for servers and highly-constrained virtual machines because it’s so tiny, but if I’m going to be running something that requires glibc, or I need the wider array of software available from a more “mainstream” distro, I prefer the stability of Debian rather than Ubuntu or Fedora, and I’d rather not set up Arch again if I can avoid it.

Probably worth noting that IT at my current job also switched from Debian to Ubuntu and back to Debian for our servers.

For desktop use, I still prefer Fedora, since the faster release cycle means that the included software and environment are kept more up to date. Ubuntu used to be my second choice on desktop, but lately I’ve been tinkering with several distros as desktop VMs, and it’s not Ubuntu I keep going back to: it’s Debian. Ubuntu feels half-baked these days. Debian stable feels solid, even if I’m running slightly older versions of software (usually with security fixes backported, at least).

I’m not sure what distribution I’d recommend to a novice these days, but I’d definitely be more inclined to recommend Debian than Arch or Alpine.