I started on Debian and I will die using Debian. I have used Ubuntu before, and I admit it is a good way for Debian to get new features like an upstream or something.

Ditto. Toyed with RH and Mandrake back in the day, but quickly moved to Debian and have been there since. Played with Ubuntu and a couple smaller niche distros, but always came back to good ol' Deborah.

...and Ian.

I'll try debian again when they move to a yearly release. Using nearly two year old software in the worst case really sucks for some use cases.

there is always testing and unstable - if you want something fresher. i personally run unstable for past 20 years. i think i had serious breakage only once

> Ubuntu is now Microsoft's lapdog.

Could you elaborate?

It could be seen as what Microsoft does, Canonical will follow in the Linux realm?

on AWS in go-go years, Ubuntu with easy defaults and permissive licenses became the number one installed VM .. by a very large margin. The numbers were not even close.. like 15x more daily volume of VMs on AWS than the next closest three or whatever.. look for yourself. That in turn begat the very hot breath of MSFT upon Ubuntu-Canonical, which shows in the boot signing keys for Ubuntu, the MSFT-private partition type in the disk installer, and the WSL. MSFT influences can be seen in the push for always-on snap with libc and unattended-upgrades phone home and the like.

> Linux Mint or MX Linux are the way to go here

So, Ubuntu, but with a slightly reskinned UI?

idk about MX Linux but Linux Mint is Ubuntu without any Snap, with additional official apt repos, Flatpack support out of the box and, last but not least, its own house made desktop environment.

To me it’s as far from Ubuntu as Ubuntu is far from Debian.

Okay, but it's all just Linux. There's no real difference between any of them.

This is 90% true, but also the 10% matters in terms of "onboarding people to the desktop," which I think still is very important (and actually going reasonably well, IMHO)

Right, but that's all taken care of. Chromebooks outsell everything else, and Android phones outsell everything else, and Steam Decks haven't quite got there yet but it's early days.

Linux is 100% of one market segment, broadband routers. No matter how staunch a Windows zealot someone is, there's a bunch of stuff they depend on that cannot be done with Windows at all, not no-how.

And without the new Ubuntu crap, yes. That's the point.

Hm. And how long have you been using Linux, exactly?

Can't tell you "exactly" because it's been so long. Might have been as early as '99? Was definitely using Ubuntu as a desktop from its literal beginning. Why?

Okay, so relatively new then. Cool, no worries.

The "new Ubuntu crap" is actually pretty good. You should take a look at it.

How is that "new?"

Anyway, no, the new Ubuntu crap is mostly just that. This isn't a mere idea; I teach IT and every semester I require folks to use a Linux desktop. Mint, MX, Lubuntu and Ubuntu, the occasional Arch are all in testing rotation; over the past few years Ubuntu/Gnome give me the most trouble -- they just suck at backwards compatibility.