A long time ago there were good reasons for Ubuntu to exist. Debian releases were very slow, sometimes years apart, and focus was on servers. But slowly Debian has incorporated all the things that make Ubuntu better than Debian. It also has a much faster release cycle.

There hasn't been a good reason to use Ubuntu over Debian for years.

Debian releases are 2 years apart roughly. The same as Ubuntu LTS.

Many Ubuntu 3rd party repos have no Debian equivalent. But there are more Debian repos than before.

Although I love Arch and use it on my main laptop, if you’re like me and you have a closet full of geriatric thinkpads, Debian is great. The one thing Arch / pacman struggles with is long intervals between updates, so if I boot a machine every three months, I’d rather have an OS in a state that was planned to persist for years.

This is so true. I had wondered if it was just me somehow messing my various manjaro/arch machines.

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.

Debian has been amazing for my fleet of geriatric ThinkPads… my T60 and X200 are my favorites to use.

Debian has also been a nice alternative. Lots of open options and compatible in most ways.

NixOS suffers a little from rapid upstream changes like Arch. You can pin nixpkgs and bump when you feel like it (or when a version of something isn’t recent enough), which is great.

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.”

If you configure apt sources to use testing or unstable upstream of Debian you can get latest kernel.

This way, you can also have a rolling distro.

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting

Been on testing for years without problems. Super reasonable choice for a personal machine if you need recent software versions. Always use a separate partition for /home, have backups in place and your golden.

Current work machine. Running fine for 4.5 years.

  $ 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

You may also want `apt-listbugs` package to see the serious bugs before running upgrade.

Wouldn't running uptime be quicker than your stat command pipeline?

stat command gets the detail of when the OS was installed on the machine. uptime doesn't give that. I wanted to say that I have been using the same development machine at work for 4.5 years. "running" was not the right word for it, obviously.

Makes sense, thanks.

I’m no AWK expert but I know just enough to tell when it’s the right tool for a particular job. Most pipelines consisting of `grep`, `sed` and `cut` commands can be replaced with a single AWK command. In this case:

    stat / | awk '/Birth:/ { print $2; }'

For the line containing the `Birth:` regex, print the second field (by default, fields are delimited by spaces). Other lines that don’t match the regex are ignored.

You can also use apt-pinning to set priority for which release to use.

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.

https://jaqque.sbih.org/kplug/apt-pinning.html

I've used ubuntu on and off for a while now, and I've been debating switching over my main computer from windows to ubuntu. Would you recommend Debian instead? Are there any downsides/incompatibilities I should be aware of before doing so? I've used Raspbian a reasonable amount, but mainly for normal raspberry pi things instead of as a desktop system so I've don't really have much hands-on experience with it

As someone who has not used Windows for years now, Ubuntu is fine, but personally I ended up switching to Fedora after a while. But I think people will always have problems with any OS and you'll hear about those more than the people that are running without issue.

If you opt for Debian, try out Linux Mint's Debian edition, it's the smoothest option for desktop use.

Mint is great, served me well for many years. Never had an issue. With Debian I would mess things up if I messed with something I should not be touching. There are faster options but it requires more maintenance. Mint gets out of your way and just works.

You would probably have issues in mint if you messed with things you should not be touching also. Seems wrong to hold that against Debian.

That's the thing about mint. You don't have to mess with it because it works. Updating, installing, deleting, changing settings, no problems. That's is my experience with mint. Cannot say the same about any other distro.

You don't have to mess with Debian either. By your own admission you were messing with things you shouldn't have been.

I did if I wanted to fix issues with WiFi, audio, installations, etc. That never happened to me when using mint. Another example: I shouldn't be messing with fixing packages after an arch update, but I sometimes have too. It has always been something simple, even less issues than debian, plus other advantages. Again, that is my experience.

> I did if I wanted to fix issues with WiFi, audio, installations, etc. That never happened to me when using mint.

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.

I switched to Mint from Ubuntu on my personal laptop, and mostly like it. I've had no compatibility issues.

I'm another Mint user.

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).

I would recommend Linux Mint first. It's definitely one of the best distros out right now and great for people coming from Windows.

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.

Seeing as everyone seems to be recommending that, I'll give it a look haha. I am pretty comfortable with Linuxes (Linuces?), I'm only on windows right now out of habit and program support, but I believe that Linux has a lot better compatibility these days through things like Proton. And if I really do need something Windows-flavoured again, I can just spin up a VM or something haha

> I like that Debian still uses apt-get

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

It's not just the command that one types. DEB packages are more widely available than RPM. The Debian repositories are larger. And for all its flaws, I find dependency resolution is done better on apt than the alternatives.

> I find dependency resolution is done better on apt than the alternatives.

Everyone says this about their favorite package manager.

Except for pip, it's like a golden standard of bad dependency resolution

> DEB packages are more widely available than RPM. The Debian repositories are larger.

This is up to the repository. If Debian choose RPM it would be as large as it already is

But it didn't and it isn't. Debian created DEB three years before RPM was created. Starting out, RPM didn't even support dependencies. I got into Linux before RPM so Debian was the obvious choice. I never understood why RPM was created.

The reason I chose debian in the first place was because of the superiority of apt-get and debian/rules over getting random things from rpmfind.net

I thought redhat distros later introduced yum as the "apt" equivalent?

Well yes: if Canonical cared they could make most of their snaps work almost as good as the Debian packages they dropped, and then it would be the same to the user.

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.

One of the major complaints in the blog post is that Snaps suck, i.e. that some ways of installing packages are much worse than others.

The people moving OSes in response to Snap presumably have strong opinions on package managers :)

I don’t care much about package managers. I left Ubuntu because it put a snap directory in my home folder, put ads in mtod, and made mount output unreadable. It felt like I lost control of my computer.

Yep, if you package your own code or scripts, deb is easy.

..or zypper install, or emerge. For other tasks though, exact arguments might differ a bit:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman_Rosetta

or alien and rpmrebuild :/

I can't live without apt-get.

I use Bodhi Linux but, besides the Desktop, this is bascially Ubuntu.

Is it specifically apt-get that you can't live without, or the concept of a package repository in general?

I'm more and more disappointed that packages are snaps and not directly installed via apt, myself.

I never really liked the RPM system.

When you bith say apt-get you also mean apt without "get" or there are major differences?

Speaking for myself: both apt and apt-get are different frontends to the same package management system and repository, which is shared by Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, and other Debian-based distros. I like the package management system; which frontend one uses (apt, apt-get, aptitude, nala, etc) is of secondary importance, as they differ only in user interface and aesthetics.

Linux Mint recently poured a lot of effort into modernizing and streamlining APT dependencies on their distro and it's great work[0]

[0] https://developer.linuxmint.com/rel_xia_whatsnew.php

They are frontends to dpkg but with their own special behaviors layered on top that aren't identical.

The sells pitch for apt is "Apt is a newer, more user-friendly version of apt-get." Apt has been around for 10 years at this point, so if they haven't switched they probably aren't going to.

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).

The apt command also merges functionality from apt-get and apt-cache.

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.

`apt` (the program) is a relatively recent addition to the APT (Advanced Package Tool) ecosystem - until not that long ago, `apt-get` was the way to install packages, and `apt` is now a "cleaner" way of interacting with APT.

I think they mean the repos. I wouldn't be surprised if apt-get is usually an alias for apt, but I don't know, I just type in apt and what I want to do.

On a server we use nala instead, it's quite nice actually, so maybe I'll start using it elsewhere too.

imho. (!)

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€

It's fairly easy to compile an updated kernel. The Linux build scripts directly support generating a .deb package that plays nice with apt.

What's the migration path? Clean install?

I migrated from Arch to Debian.

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.

Fedora repos aren't that much smaller anymore. The difference used to be bigger.

I moved from debian to ubuntu because stable was too slow and testing was too unstable. Been on ubuntu on my laptop for 15 years, just seems like a hassle to move now, despite the straws (snaps etc)

>The smaller repo is what keeps me off Fedora.

Huh. I didn't notice that in my personal experience. And with Fedora I at least get recent versions of software.