I would say it's a bit easier to get into, with generally less lag and slightly better UI. The game is still extremely complicated but at least the wiki for each server is packaged as part of the game now and is pretty easy to navigate

14 is a remake of 13 in C#. I never played 13, tho I tried to get it working on linux a few months ago with no success.

14's active player count I believe has surpassed 13 and I regularly see folks on 14 who are playing 14 for their first time after playing 13 for years, and they seem quite happy with it.

Hell, there's collaboration between (I think) monke station (ss13) and Starlight (ss14) because monke is working on moving to 14, based on Starlight's fork, and Starlight had a big influx of players from that server who wanted to check out their potential future.

It's fucking amazing. I mostly play on Hardlight, an 18+ furry erotic roleplay allowed server, which is also pioneering saving ships with big stashes for items, and seamless round transitions (you evac back to CC after a round, but if you have your own ship it just FTLs to CC and you remain in the world instead of going back to the new round screen, and you just FTL again to the next station). But I also have a TON of time on Starlight Alpha which is also amazing (and not ERP if you're not into that :P)

The big differences are that ss14 runs a lot better but ss13 has a lot more content, but the content difference is rapidly shrinking. ss14 is definitely the way to go now.

Highly recommend you check it out! Can get the launcher on steam and it's like zero effort to install and launch even on linux