Jump to Debian. It has always worked towards users' interests, and probably will continue doing that because pretty much all developers are volunteers and are running a democratically driven development process. I never understood why Ubuntu is so popular because it's 99.99% Debian, and only gives you a handful of things on top of that: predictable release schedule (which is a two-edged sword if you think about it), PPAs (same), proprietary drivers out of the box, and 10 years of support if you're willing to pay.

I remember when Mark shipped Ubuntu CDs for free to anyone who requested them. Always wanted to get one, but never did because I was able to obtain Ubuntu ISOs through other means, so it didn't feel like the right thing to do. (Although we were using dial-up up until 2008 or so.) Those times seem to have passed long ago.

Made the jump and couldn't be happier. One thing I noticed to keep in mind: Debian doesn't seem to be as proactive nor expansive as ununtu when it comes to security updates. I'm subscribed to both dsa and usn mailing lists and the updates conancal puts out are far more numerous and timely.

Also, debians unattended upgrades packages leaves a lot of packages unupdated by default.

Lastely, ubuntu releases have a well-defined and known life span. You know exacly what date support will end. Not so with Debian.

If you're like me and willing to deal with these shortcomings, then I highly recommend switching to Debian!

I would, if I used desktop Linux. I sort of do on my homelab sort of setup, but I'm specifically using Raspberry Pi OS because, well, my homelab is something like 30 raspberry pi's doing various things (yes, I know this isn't a good idea, but that doesn't mean I want to stop doing it).

I only have one laptop, and it's running something a bit more Redmond oriented.

Ubuntu was nice because, when it came out, Debian was several years out of date without having done a release. Ubuntu promised to do smaller, incremental releases and do LTS versions as well which is a promise they have kept. I remember trying Debian and having the choice of installing an old ass version of a program or setting up their leading edge version, which often caused problems with system stability. Ubuntu was a good balance - they had new software versions that worked.

Not only that but for a long time their default gnome configuration worked very well (back when they had the top and bottom panel thing). Debian very much threw you into it and said "Here's Gnome, have fun!" and you had to spend hours on a second computer learning how to install a browser and configure it (and go through multiple iterations of startx failing because your config was not right, because you were learning stuff).

I don't use either any more - most of my linux use is on Raspberry Pi OS, WSL, or in some container or something.

(Specific, upstream-provided) PPAs are the main reason I use Ubuntu Server. Given that they're built against Ubuntu's separately-version-sequenced package ecosystem, I can't expect PPAs that install cleanly on Ubuntu to be able to find the same packages required to install cleanly on Debian. If I could, I'd just use Debian and then forcibly add the PPAs as apt sources.

Flatpak has solved these use cases for me, and also has been preferable to adding PPAs that I can't always verify are safe.

Isn't it still unsupported to upgrade from one stable Debian version to another? I mean I know you can hack your way around it, just change the apt repos to point at the new release, run apt update, upgrade and dist-upgrade, and hope that not too much stuff breaks. But the nice thing about Ubuntu, especially for less technical people, is that the system will just prompt you to update when it's time, and the upgrade process is supported and well-tested.

Er, was it ever unsupported, or just not push-button?

>Isn't it still unsupported to upgrade from one stable Debian version to another?

It's always worked for me. Change repos to new release name. sudo apt update, apt dist-upgrade, and everything typically works. On one machine I went through 3 consecutive point releases with now issues. You can also hold off on upgrading right away, as the old stable branch is supported for (iirc) another year.

> proprietary drivers out of the box

This is it for me. Ubuntu works out of the box as well as Windows does with any hardware I've chosen. From what I've heard, the same can't be said for most other distros.

I use Linux because I like being able to tweak my experience easily, but I do not enjoy spending time fiddling with drivers. I'd rather use Ubuntu and disable the things I don't like than use something that's more "pure" out of the box but have to tweak a bunch of configurations to get things to work properly.

AFAIK debian recently voted to include proprietary drivers in their installer by default. Don't know all the details off hand though

> It has always worked towards users' interests,

This is objectively not true. Debian has not worked for users interests in several cases.

One such case I experienced years ago, and the reason I switched to Ubuntu, was while at university with a laptop. I had been using Debian on and off alongside Windows for a long time by that point but then a new version of Debian came out. It might have been Debian 7.

Previously Debian had shipped with the correct Intel drivers/firmware for this laptops (incredibly well supported and common at the time) WiFi chipset.

However in the (then latest) version they refused to ship the driver because "we don't support non-free software". I was left in the situation where I could no longer 1) properly finish setting up the laptop as there was no longer internet access, 2) unable to use the ethernet sockets in the buildings as they were locked down to specific MAC addresses.

It took several days for me to be able to get a USB drive, find another PC I could run the Windows -> ISO program from Microsoft, write it to the USB drive, and then finally reinstall Windows.

I don't care for how dogmatic and Stallman-like they approached this, and I don't care how people try to defend this, it's simply not the case they have always worked for users interests. By removing a previously shipped driver that fucks over a user even being able to use their machine, they are working to harm the users interests.

This is why Ubuntu won. It just works. It loads """non-free""" drivers. I heard recently that Debian might finally ship with the type of drivers they used to. Too little too late.

Remember when you could get an Ubuntu CD (including jewel case) from the front cover of a magazine?