Linux nerds - anyone running vanilla debian for desktop? I'm sick of Ubuntu's quirks and tossing up between mint and debian for my laptop. I am ~so old~ experienced so am fine with tinkering and do always come back to Gnome so thinking to just go back to basics. Just thought I would throw the thought outbtheiand see what others are using: what's your daily driver?

IMO, definitely dump Ubuntu as quick as you can. Linux Mint is a great Ubuntu-based alternative that gets you all the benefits of Ubuntu (plus some) and none of the Canonical bullshit. If you want to divorce from Ubuntu entirely, LMDE is a great project that rebases Mint on plain Debian! Another lovely project by that team.

Personally, my first pick daily driver is OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. If you like playing with config files and the idea of hyper-replicable system setups NixOS is a very interesting project that I've enjoyed a lot in the past.

CachyOS is getting quite a lot of attention recently, and as far as Arch-based distros go I have enjoyed using it. It has a lot of performance claims, but does come with all the drawbacks of ArchLinux and bleeding-edge rolling release distros -- not that it's a terrible experience, it just requires you to be more mindful and more capable than your average distro, especially if you're going to utilize the AUR.

TL;DR - there are a boatload of interesting distros out there. My first recommendation would be Linux Mint/LMDE for familiarity and ease of entry.

Maybe LMDE is the best of both worlds for you.

At the moment, Aurora (non-gaming Fedora KDE Bazzite flavour) on laptops/minipc and Bazzite on desktop.

Would I recommend? If you never need to install anything tricky (unless you distrobox it) as guides don't tend to suit atomic desktops, then it just works and silently updates in background all the time. Flatpak covers most needed software. KDE version is nice. It does suit users that really don't care they are using Linux.

Nothing ever seems to go wrong but I won't lie, at one time early in the piece, there was some manual intervention required due to error they had. Nothing since.

EndeavourOS: the minimalism of Arch made intermediate-user-friendly.

My daily driver laptop is Fedora KDE Plasma ......... because I love updating everyday. I also have an old all-in-one for the kitchen that runs Mint perfectly. My bro uses Arch from the command line only, but I don't have time for that

I usually just run Xubuntu. I think it avoids most of the Canonical bullshit while still being close enough that everything that works on Ubuntu works on it. My main desktop and my old laptop are Xubuntu, and my work laptop is Ubuntu with a gnome plug-in to give me the top application bar like XFCE. But I'm obviously not too annoyed by Canonical.

Debian (stable, with necessary non free) for both desktop and laptops. XFCE. Solid as a rock.

guiiiiiiix 🥰

Have been dying to dump it for ages but been travelling a lot and just needed to not stuff with things and risk getting caught out. Been looking at LMDE today - looks interesting. I am home for a while now so will probably play with options. It's been a while

I switched from Ubuntu to Fedora once I had enough of Ubuntu being weird. Very happy with Fedora in general. I know it's not a very enlightened suggestion.

I'm also curious how Gnome OS develops, but I'm not sure I would go there yet.

I'm on command line a lot of the time but never got into Arch. fedora KDE is a solid choice. I'm in debian based land on servers so have kept to that for ages though.

nixos for servers and laptops

bazzite for gaming desktops

Been using Linux Mint - Cinnamon starting over two years ago just before Spring. Made the decision to take the plunge when at the time, Windows 10 was going to lose support in 2025 and hated the idea of upgrading to Windows 11. Glad I made that leap, because it's been a pretty good experience and everything felt like a breath of fresh air, especially since you can actually change the fonts of everything on the desktop as well like you could Windows 7 and earlier iterations of that OS and I can even still do the gaming that I enjoy, what with proton and even Heroic.

Even decided to get a 1TB drive for my Zenbook and pop Linux Mint onto that. Since then, no computers I have, be it laptop, or even netbook have any iteration of Windows.

As for the netbook, an EEE PC 1000HE model, I would take it with me to a library just to mess about with it, which has MX Linux running on it, which sadly the 32-bit version will lose support in 2028, which is a bit of a shame.

Debian is fine for daily driving. I was doing that for a while before switching to openSUSE Tumbleweed for newer components (I was goofing around with Podman quadlets and needed later systemd bits).

Traveling a lot right now, so I just changed to openSUSE Slowroll for a slower pace of rolling, and smaller download size.

I've used Arch with Cinnamon as the DE for the last five(ish) years. I used to run Mint (which is what got me onto Cinnamon) on my previous desktop but figured I'd try something else. I'd often come across helpful info on the Arch wiki when I needed to look stuff up so decided I might as well go with that, and it's worked out fine (ok, I did get the system to not boot fully once due to an update issue, but I sorted it without reinstalling).

I love Fedore KDE for daily driver, but I confess to falling (back?) To Debian Gnome for a lot of what I'm doing now.
And I agree, Ubuntu's "quirks" finally pushed me into Fedora.

Same. First thing I do is disable snaps. Other than snaps, I’ve not run up against anything annoying Ubuntu has done (that I’m aware of).

Also been using Kubuntu a lot more lately because it has some neat applications. I love how plain XFCE is though. XFCE and KDE such great DEs.

anyone running vanilla debian for desktop?

Yes. I don't want Linux finicky bits getting into the way of my everyday productivity, and Debian just works™. It's great because it just sits there and does its job

And Flatpak for anything cutting edge

I have two machines running Bazzite and two running Debian. I've got KDE on both Debian machines and GNOME on one because I don't mind it.

Debian is good enough to use as a daily driver for me. I don't have the deepest IT background so I'm not playing around with configuration files or anything. The only issues I ran into with it was an earlier version of Firefox that didn't support multiple profiles in the same way as the current version, and there was something else that wasn't preinstalled that I just had to download. Otherwise, all good.

Mint. Been about 2 years I think so far. No real problems

Debian is great, especially if you don't need the bleeding-edge versions of things. And if you need a couple things more up-to-date, there are usually appimages or flatpaks available.

My personal daily driver is CachyOS. I do a fair bit of gaming and need recent versions of things, and I've found it to be stable for me. It's not one I would recommend to everyone, though.

Debian here. I used Mint after ditching Ubuntu around 2010. For some reason, when I upgraded the drives in my internal RAID1 from 2TB to 14TB a fresh Mint only recognized 999GB... Ubuntu too (tried just out of curiosity). Grandma Debian recognized the full size so I installed and stayed. That was 2022ish. No complaints.

It is a old (2013?) mobo / firmware RAID, not a "true" RAID, and those are known to be a bit odd.

I use pikaos as my daily. Its based on debian unstable (which lets be honest plenty of stable for a desktop) but with the cachyos kernel.

Catchy on the PC. Kubuntu on the old MS Surface's. I preferred Bazzite to catchy.

Been running fedora for over a decade now. New packages, stable, newest gnome. No complaints at all.

My old experienced ass does not like to futz so I run lazy setups. I was using zorin before but since I wanted to play games I went to bazzite but I also like the immutable philosophy.

Worked with/on Linux and Unix since kernel 1.2.13. This is a popularity contest, but I'll play.

Desktop: nobara44 (fedora) - putty-not-xterm, steam, lutris, chrome, seamonkey . Will consider PCLinuxOS

Day job: Solaris11, EL7(tuxcare)/9/10 , private stuff.

Night job: EL6 :-( , EL7(tuxcare)/9/f44 - putty, cinc, gitlab-ci-terraform, proxmox, vsphere, ollama

Surface’s

You never need an apostrophe for pluralization. Save them from over-harvesting before they go extinct!

And Flatpak for

...random confusion and installed-state SoT breaks.

Debian, on both my various servers and desktop. It just works.

I'm not using Debian on any of my main PCs, but it's the only Linux distro that pretty much never breaks within it's 2 year LTS cycle, BTRFS is not needed. Ubuntu has minor breakages every once in a while.

EoS is just Arch, there is nothing much there that makes it different from Arch. People have this misconception that the difficulty of Arch is installing, when in reality long term maintenance is the real hurdle & EoS is 100% the same in that regard.

Debian package manager is the best, so go ahead and use real Debian rather than one of these forks

I run Ubuntu on my main work machine, and Debian everywhere else.

I dunno. I actually miss some of the Canonical tweaks to Gnome… but honestly, if you said I had to use Debian from now on I’d shrug and move on.

I'll let my autocorrect know that you've got some advice for it.

Debian pretty much everywhere. Tumbleweed on my desktop

LMDE.

But truth be told I'd probably just use base debian at this point. I just like Cinnamon, clean and easy.

Use case: accessing virtual machines via remmina and docker containers by browser. No gaming. occasional light document work.

Maybe I didn't give it enough time or did a wrong config during install, but my first time using straight vanilla debian, I didn't like how I needed to add my account to root. This was fairly early on in my time using Linux, so that was all my fault and nothing wrong with Debian. Left a sour taste that I could easily get over now, but that would require me to use/install it...

So, instead, I just use MX for now. It's Debian based, but I cannot say whether it's better than Debian itself due to lack of vanilla deb usage.

Arch ain't even that hard to install nowadays thanks to the "arch install" command, too. I've tried following their official install instructions on their wiki, but I almost always switch to using that command to get it installed because they made that process so much easier for dummies like me.

Best of both worlds for those that wanna learn and for those that just wanna install with less hassles, IMO.

Mint, never any problems.

CachyOS - wanted Steam hardware compatability, and familiarity; KDE provides.

I liked Ubuntu but at the time it randomly crashed my Wi-Fi driver, killing my system within hours to weeks...

Wish I'd go back to Nyarch (KDE) for the meme but I was on Gnome and wanted to try some recommendations. I liked Bazzite more than CachyOS, but I don't understand Fedora and struggled to install an RPM file despite instructions :(

Currently running bazzite for gaming pc/programming. Got my home server up and running the other weekend and using ubuntu on it

apostrophe's' are 'evil' anyway'

No distro should ever be even slightly difficult to install, it's a really daft design choice.

Can you explain what you mean by long term maintenance?

Is it just regular updating or something else?

I use either debian or Zorin.

Debian because it just fucking works. Zorin because it's pretty.

I’ve been running Bazzite for a while now, it isn’t truly inmuteable but it isn’t the best if you want to tinker.

Bazzite has been excellent for trouble free gaming but probably wouldn’t be my first choice for an older laptop

LMDE with vanilla gnome on top

I switched from windows to fedora as my daily driver in 2024. Fedora sucked imo. Slow updates and just difficult to configure in the ways I wanted.

Used arch install to put arch on my work laptop early 2025 and have not looked back. Switched my desktop to arch not long after. pacman is amazing and I can't imagine doing it any other way now. The look on the IT guy's face at work when he suggested we try obs to test a camera, and I had it installed and booted within 20 seconds was priceless.