Zorin OS makes so many right choices in my opinion, especially as a serious alternative for normal people to recommend. But they are ubuntu based just like Pop!OS, elementaryOS or Mint.
Mint has LMDE at least and are pushing it pretty hard. Never used it as a daily driver but have heard that it is stable and fast.
I also use Debian Testing with GNOME and it works perfectly fine.
What does Ubuntu offer that Debian does not for so many Distros to build of. Is it extended hardware support? or is it just an historical choice made back when Debian was not a great choice of a base for whatever reason? I really do not get it. As a non-maintainer i expect it to be a nightmare to have an already heavily changed base to build on and Ubuntus choices in the past were also rather questionable.
It has newer packages than Debian. And even though Debian releases new stables every couple years, at least historically, it has kept old package versions around for way longer than that. Before I started using ubuntu sometime in the '10s, it was normal for a debian stable package to be upwards of 10 years out of date.
And it wasn’t like today where you have containers/VMs, PPAs, flatpak/appimage/snap/etc… if you needed a newer version of a package for whatever reason, often you couldn’t just compile it yourself or use the testing/unstable one because it had cascading dependencies that were also newer, so you were just screwed. Being able to have a “stable” release with newer packages was a huge draw for Ubuntu.
This is not quite true. They have overlapping release cycles. A new Debian release will ship frozen versions of the latest packages, causing it to have newer packages than most ubuntu releases. Then the new ubuntu release comes out, with and it has newer packages. Ubuntu doesn’t universally newer packages than debian. The difference is that Debian ONLY does security updates, and doesn’t do feature updates or even bugfixes over it’s lifespan. Ubuntu, on the other hand, does ship feature updates and bug fixes, incrementing the package version as they go over the lifespan of an Ubuntu release.
Comparing the bash versions of the latest ubuntu stable version versus the current debian stable, and you’ll notice that Debian has a newer bash:
[moonpie@osiris moonpiedumplings.github.io]$ podman run -it --rm debian root@980ac170ddb4:/# bash --version GNU bash, version 5.2.37(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html> This is free software; you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. root@980ac170ddb4:/# exit exit [moonpie@osiris moonpiedumplings.github.io]$ podman run -it --rm ubuntu Resolved "ubuntu" as an alias (/etc/containers/registries.conf.d/00-shortnames.conf) Trying to pull docker.io/library/ubuntu:latest... Getting image source signatures Copying blob 817807f3c64e done | Copying config f794f40ddf done | Writing manifest to image destination root@1486a1c38699:/# bash --version GNU bash, version 5.2.21(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html> This is free software; you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.This is Ubuntu 24, the current stable release. 25/questing, the rolling version does have newer/same package versions of debian. But people don’t base distros off of the rolling version of ubuntu, only the stable releases.
I can’t tell you how many installs I killed back in the day by dividing down the dependency rabbit hole.