Great choice. And if you do ever find yourself in a hurry for the latest version of something, there is flatpak and appimage.

It is a wonderful time to be a Linux user.

Linux in general is the wise choice, no matter the distribution.

It's a peaceful life.

, but I actually like Debian’s slow update cycle,

That's one of debian's strengths and an often overlooked feature that I believe many people would love as well. I even had a professor migrating from windows to debian simply because he's, in his words: "tired of things changing all the time without my permission. I want a system that stays the same for as long as possible and barely changes". Debian was like a natural choice for him. I thought he would be asking me for help in the transition, but he said he's "ok and learning by searching on the internet", and that he's "investing some time on earning it, because the guarantee of minimal changes makes the it an investment, instead of a waste of time".

As an Arch user (btw) Debian is more than respectable. Truly one of the greatest distros of all time alongside Fedora, OpenSuse, and Alpine

:3

Only downside ive seen with Debian is slower rollouts and some packages missing in their repos. Its because they prioritize stability.

If Debian fits your use case theres no reason not to stay. I ditched Debian after I accidentally created my frankendebian monster which i was way too unknowledgable to save back then.

And hey, welcome to Linux!

One of my favorite things about linux is the freedom to choose. There is not a perfect one size fits all starterpack. Everyone has different needs and expectations which is why the starter distro questions have so many different answers. Those answers aren't wrong as they meet the needs from the presenters point of view.

Debain is a great choice. Nothing wrong with debain. I use it for my media server.

Welcome to your linux journey.

Debian is great, though I do wish they'd make it easier for new users to find their unofficial live image/installers since booting the desktop of your choice with no hassle is great:
https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current-live/amd64/iso-hybrid/

Debian is wonderful. Nothing to add...

Debian is a great choice.

I think the majority of modern distros are all fine for beginners really.

The advantage with debian is the very large user base and ecosystem - you won't encounter a problem that someone else hasn't already solved.

I started with Debian as a noob many years ago. Still using it. It's good. I distro-hopped a bit in my first few years but ended up with Debian. Now I've a mix of Ubuntu (which in my mind is debian), Debian and raspbian.

There's other distros that are good too, this is just what worked for me.

I think Linux mint Debian edition is cool if you want to use Cinnamon, but otherwise Debian makes sense.

I used to live in a place where the internet was very fast, so I could use Arch Linux with its large daily updates without any problems. Then I moved to a place where the internet is very slow, and continuing to use Arch Linux is no longer an option. As a result, I switched from Arch to Debian, and the first thing I noticed is that I rarely have updates.

I actually like Debian’s slow update cycle, as I don’t want to be bothered often with setting up my system again.

I've been there too!

Updating to a new version is such a chore: you have to follow the news, then wonder how long to wait before updating, then you have to set aside at least a few hours for the actual update (well, for fixing what may go wrong - not that stuff actually goes wrong, but you still set aside some time just in case).

The solution to this is in the exact opposite direction you'd imagine.

For a few years (since last time I got a new PC), I've been running a rolling distro (tumbleweed *) and... it's been great: no big updates, just incremental ones.

If anything breaks (and it never happened to me: there has been times where errors prevented the system to update, but never has it broken on me), you just boot the snapshot before the last update and try again in a few hours/days.

I want something as close as “set it and forget it” as possible.

That's nixos :) It takes a long time to "set" (and you never really finish doing it) but you can switch to a new PC at any time and have your exact system on it (bar what the few things you have to change to account for the different hardware, of course).

* I hear that with arch&co you actually have to follow the release notes as sometimes there are manual tasks to do - it's not so in tumbleweed (at least, as much as i know and as far as me experience goes) - IDK about other rolling distros (or debian testing/sid)

Solid choice 👍

If you want Debian plus some nice tools, I'd recommend MX Linux. It's based on Debian stable and mosrly just has a few convenient extras. Like installing nvidia drivers with one click, or being able to create a bootable ISO of your exact system. It has a few other neat tools, too.

Wouldn't be surprised if you could just nab those tools ad hoc as desired for normal Debian, though.

I love Debian. I've bounced around distros a lot, for various reasons, but I'll always have a soft spot for Debian.

The problem with reputations — both in terms of Linux distros and just in general — is that they tend to reflect conventional wisdom from 10-20 years ago. Sometimes that conventional wisdom was off-base from the start, and sometimes it's just outdated.

Like, "Debian is hard" and "Ubuntu is great for beginners". That was true enough 20 years ago. But today, not really.

My last distro-hop was to Bazzite because Debian didn't have the latest GPU drivers that I needed (Debian 13 "Trixie" does now, btw). It was just bad timing that I upgraded to a brand-new GPU toward the end of Debian 12's life cycle. If I'd waited another 6 months (or if I didn't need good OpenCL/ROCm/Vulkan performance) I probably would've stuck with Debian.

I'm fine on Bazzite, but I feel like if I ever hop again, it'll be back to Debian. Now that I am comfortable with DistroBox, I won't worry so much about older application packages in Debian repos; if push comes to shove I'll just run it in a Fedora box or something like that. Drivers are the only thing to worry about, and I'm not likely to upgrade my GPU again for 5+ years so I should be fine.

You chose wisely

I'm a noob and I prefer... Debian?

The beauty of linux is you get to run whatever you prefer. Have fun and be productive in the way you like. :-)

Mint is actually based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian.

It's all down to your use case. I've been using CachyOS on my desktop and laptop because I game, but for my homelab? Debian all the way(well Proxmox on bare metal, Debian containers).

But I don't understand what you're saying about Desktop Environments here? You can install most DEs on pretty much any distro...I get you probably like the Out-Of-Box experience, but I wouldn't let that be the limiting factor in your distro choice.

I do love Plasma though and it's my defacto DE choice with any distro I use.

I mean that is great but its far easier to add kde through the software center than add nvidia through command line.

Debian is fantastic; I use it on every server I can.

I mean, "the hard way": install a desktops meta-package/group, then configure your display manager (login mask), some also support auto-detect.

I'm a veteran and I prefer Debian-based distros because I don't want have to constantly tinker with something that I need to simply work.

That's what I'm using these days at home

Only thing to keep in mind is that it won't give you a notification when you need to do a major version update (pretty consistently every 2 years)

Wait until you try NixOS

I started with Ubuntu (when it was left, right and center in my country) but soon gravitated towards Debian. The old packages can be a pain sometimes ( I even tried running Debian Unstable for sometime and ironically that is quite Stable as well) but other things are quite sane.

The distro isn't hard to use (though it does not hand hold like Zorin OS, say) compared to likes of Gentoo or Arch and deb packages are quite common (for third party software).

I ultimately(distro hopped a lot) settled on Void Linux but Debian, IMO, is still slightly easier. The only Achilles' Heel is the woefully sore update cycle since the focus is on stability.

Ever since IBM / Red Hat ruined CentOS, I’ve been using Debian when I need Linux. Welcome in from the cold. We have hot coco and blankets.

It's completely fine to use a beginner-friendly distro and stick with it. Just be aware you are missing a lot by not going deeper into linux.

t. Started with ZorinOS. Ended up using (pretty much) anything that is in front of me, minimal install, sway, no DE. On a orange pi 5 MAX.

Debian, not a bad idea but where I live I have shared wireless only, so I'd have to install the wireless drivers manually using my phone to search for advice. Not even sure how that'd go. Easier if I had ethernet.

I like the idea of fewer updates and fewer bugs.

I use gentoo on my main PC and debian on an old Thinkpad.

Debian is solid as a rock provided you don't edit the sources to make it a "FrankenDebian" where it is pulling in more recent packages like Ubuntu.

Debian would be good if it didn't use apt

While learning about all the Linux stuff I came to know about desktops, and I felt like, if I wanted to ever use a different one, yes, it could be installed the hard way, but I would rather have a distro that can be installed with my desired desktop by default, and the one that got my attention was KDE.

'sudo apt install kde-full' is "the hard way"?