I distro hopped for a bit before finally settling in Debian (because Debian was always mentioned as a distro good for servers, or stable machines that are ok with outdated software)
And while I get that Debian does have software that isn’t as up to date, I’ve never felt that the software was that outdated. Before landing on Debian, I always ran into small hiccups that caused me issues as a new Linux user - but when I finally switched over to Debian, everything just worked! Especially now with Debian 13.
So my question is: why does Debian always get dismissed as inferior for everyday drivers, and instead mint, Ubuntu, or even Zorin get recommended? Is there something I am missing, or does it really just come down to people not wanting software that isn’t “cutting edge” release?
Personally, yeah it’s the old packages. I want to play games on my desktop and have the newest DE features. An arch based distro seems like it’ll keep up better than Debian.
For my servers though, I only use Debian.
Ok, so it seems that gaming is a recurring theme from the few comments so far.
My curiosity then would lead me to wonder opinions from a non-gaming standpoint.
Do you think you would mind as much if you didn’t use your machine for gaming? Would the slightly older packages still affect you?
Linux has gotten really good over the last ~15 years. It used to be that if you didn’t have the most up to date packages, you would be missing game changing features. Now, the distribution you use almost doesn’t matter because even the older packages are good enough for most things.
To answer your question, if it weren’t for gaming, no I wouldn’t mind using Debian as my daily driver. If I ever needed a new package for whatever reason, I would use flatpaks, snaps, docker, or Distrobox to get it.