I am pretty sure I started with either Halloween or Mother's Day because Red Hat Linux for Dummies came with Red Hat 2.1 which I am pretty sure came out in 96 or 97. I know Red Hat 6 was released in 1999, because I was neck deep in Y2K work at the time I installed it on my Compaq laptop.

Beyond none of its branches actually satisfying my preferences, I feel like the way it handles major version upgrades is way too involved. I suppose it makes sense; it's paying back the accumulated debt of a couple years worth of bliss...

Having said that, my experience on Fedora Atomic is (almost) equally blissful without requiring any of that whenever a major version update strikes.

Don't get me wrong; I definitely do believe Debian has its uses on desktop Linux. But I can't shake off the feeling that they're definitely more niche compared to say Fedora.

I love Debian, I use it as a desktop and it's installed on all my machines, but it has some problems/quirks that make it hard to recommend it for desktop usage.

First one is that it doesn't have sensible defaults, the OS expects a user who is an admin, one who will configure things to their liking. I would consider this to be a feature, if it weren't for the second problem, the documentation. The documentation is wayy too dated, lots of pages in the wiki haven't been updated since Debian Buster days!

A better recommendation would be probably a Debian derivative like MX Linux. They are more opinionated, but as far as I know, they come with better defaults and offer newer guides, documentation, etc.

Debian is nice & boring, but I have had issues with how old its kernel and software versions are. 6.12 isn't too bad for Trixie, but previously it was really terrible. When I was running Bookworm, I ran into plenty of situations where software I was compiling or getting from outside the repos (for niche software), wasn't backwards compatible to the library versions Debian provided.

No hate for Debian, but it just doesn't work for a lot of people. However, these days I would go for Debian over Ubuntu 10 times out of 10.

debian always seems to be forgotten outside of its server use

Nah, not even for servers. SLSA and ISO27002. Validation in the other distros is better, and that's night-and-day for server sector.

I worked Unix in 99-06 and there's a reason their Linux offering wasn't debian: that validation hole.

If you like to fiddle, I might suggest Arch. 😁 Hit me up if you want help with getting started!

I don't do either of those things tho

Uh, twenty years ago? Why's that?

It is; it’s a Lenovo Legion 5. Or something like that.

I sometimes dual boot into windows on the same laptop and it also hits the fans hard, especially after booting up, but it doesn’t suffer the periodic fan problem. Not that I’m shilling for windows. I hate windows and use Linux on my server.

Yes, in one of their two main releases. The other default is KDE Plasma.

I could make any de do what I want, but gnome is closest to what I’d build out of the box. And that’s a very simple interface. I particularly like the finger gestures on my laptop touchpad. Once you train your brain, you zoom between desktops and programs on a single screen laptop equivalent to multiple monitors.

Additionally, I’ve found a few simple extensions that I’m sure have kde equivalents, but I’m a creature of habit. Grid is awesome, makes window tiling and snapping awesome. Caffeine for keeping things alive. And a few others. Mostly though it’s just speed of use - especially on the laptop.

One thing though I hate about gnome though is its high dpi monitor scaling support with Wayland when gaming. There’s four or five really dumb things it does. Sometimes it’s easiest to just change the resolution to what you want prior to launching the game.

same reasons as OP. I want my desktop OS to be simple, and I focus on my homelab

What did you struggle with?

You know? Like, there's zero friction with Arch, I feel like. It's just out of your way.

Linus liking something doesn't mean anything. He has some other strange opinions too.

Gnome has slowly become like a DE made by Apple. Even trying to configure it to use a screen shot app other than the integrated one is a fucking chore, they want you to forcibly use theirs, which is great for basic screen shooting, but I'm more of a flames hot fan because of how seamless it is to annotate on any shot instead of taking the shot, having to use a second app to edit/annotate, and then, I don't know when it started, but every screenshot gets saved as a picture now, no way to just use it with the clipboard and let it disappear on the next SC or copy.

Then there's the mentality. In GNOME If a feature doesn’t fit the design language, no matter how popular, it's rejected. Dissenting opinions on design choices are almost always met with "trust the process."

Isnt gnome a bit more resource intensive? also like the option of more customization if i ever wanna change the layout or aesthetic.