They say debian is free and has its promise, but Arch has like 2-4 maintainers?
free as in free beer: literally any distro other than winux/linuxfx/wubuntu free as in libre: trisquel
What do you mean by free? Why did only those two make your list?
In general, I recommend Fedora KDE Spin (or Fedora Kinoite if you know what containers are)
For your question, I would go for debian. But the answer also depends on your use-case. Software dev? CLI user? Gamer?
Why have you forsaken God? You should be praying in TempleOS.
larp larp larp sahur ✌️
Most based opinion i’ve seem here
If you don’t care, go with Mint. Fast, secure, simple.
If you have some special thing like an old slow computer, uptime or specific security needs and so on, check out all the other good answers here in the post.
NixOS ;)
Fucking sadistic bastard…I second this.
Let me expose my lack of knowledge and experience in this.
Afaik. NixOS is completely build from configs, thus easy to VCS, and you can try stuff and then just roll back like nothing happened… what’s the difference to snapshots and why is it sadistic/masochistic but worth it?
Give me your NixOS pitch.
If you know vaguely what you’re doing or are willing to learn, you can go with whatever and it’ll be fine.
Personally not a big fan of debian because they tend to be slower and more conservative on updates. Arch is a bit more technical, but very customizable.
I’m personally a big fan of Fedora. Software updated quickly enough to have all the bells and whistles, slow enough to not get cut by bleeding edge software.
I think it’s Ubuntu that’s slow, while Debian as its base is smaller and faster?
Slower on updates, not slow to run. Slower on updates is referring to how it takes longer for new features / software to be shipped out for you to download. Debian usually prioritizes machines that chug along for a long time without anything breaking, rather than adding new stuff
You’re right that it’s not slow to run. It is small and fast
No, Debian is typically quite a bit older than even the Ubuntu LTS. E.g. they currently still don’t ship a Nvidia driver that supports the 50 series GPUs.
Ubuntu is based off the testing version of Debian, so they have newer software versions
The fact that you’re asking this suggests you might be new to linux so go Mint but if it has to be one of those two then Debian
Linux Mint Debian Edition. Best of both worlds.
The lack of PPA support might bite you though. For newcomers I’d strongly recommend staying with the standard Mint (Cinnamon) version, any reason not to is highly technical and more of an issue for the maintainers.
If you are interested in maintaining your OS as an ongoing and constant project, go with Arch. You will learn a lot about Linux, and about system administration in general. You will also have entire days where you are unable to do anything productive with your computer because the last update broke userspace again and you can either spend a lot of time troubleshooting your specific problem, or spend a lot of time reinstalling and reconfiguring your system.
If your computer is more than just a hobby platform and you need to use it regularly for any kind of productivity, go with Debian. Set it and forget it.
Either way, off-system file backups are recommended.
Unless you intentionally doing something wrong or have close to zero experience with linux there might some of the problems you’ve mentioned, also you can expect similar on debian if you are having them on arch.
Anyway, I would recommend something other to OP because both of these distributions require some non-zero experience with linux. (Also OP itself feels like trolling)
Is your hardware ten years old or more?
Do you want a system made up of software that is on average 3 years old?
Do you want absolutely ridiculous stability for the uptime memes?
Are you a fan of the idea that every design decision should be done by a committee of theoretically democratically chosen developers but is actually just whoever wants the job because there is never any real transparency or motion about when the meetings are, much less when elections are?
Does the idea of your operating system being compatible not because its good but because it’s just the largest base thanks to corporate investment make you moist?
Then pick Debian.
If you answered no to literally any of those options then go ahead and pick an Arch flavor, or Arch itself.
You mean Cachy OS? Yeah, I’ve heard of that, might choose it, I dunno yet.
Linux '26er here. I tried a few and CachyOS is now my jam. I’m way too new to offer true insight, but as a new convert, Cachy has good video/gaming support and all the core features I need to keep exploring. 100% recommend a day or two to try it out.
I run Cachyos (KDE), for 10 months now, on a 13 year old HP workstation. Daily updates. Best distro I’ve used (previously used Mint, SuSE, Debian, Ubuntu), wouldn’t go back to any of the others.
I’m also fairly new, and one big benefit of CachyOS is the sensible defaults. You get to start with the modern way of doing things instead of having to discover them slowly.
microinstead ofnanofor exampleBut is it catchy?
I mean, you can install each in a VM if you want to play with them.
