Daily friver here. Stable for servers, testing for workstations.
Debian Testing isn’t as stable as Stable, but has been far more reliable than anyone else’s desktop releases. I’m also not a fan of Fedora and others’ policy of ending support on the day of a new release.
If for some reason you decide to hold back on an upgrade of Testing, you’ve still got five years of patch support coming. And if I do want to live on the bleeding edge, there’s always Sid (also called Unstable). That’s where you’ll run into the kind of instability you can expect from a rolling release.
My favorite will probably always be Gentoo, but I don’t always have time for that hobby.
CountVon@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Naw, Debian Unstable is unstable. /s
Jokes aside, I don’t think I’d use Debian as a daily driver for desktop Linux, and I really like Debian. Now, for a server? Debian all day erry day. But as soon as a GUI is needed, I’m gonna look to another distro. For context though, that’s mainly because my daily driver needs to be gaming capable, and I have a very recent GPU. Debian 13 has Mesa 25.0, but 25.1 and 25.2 have fixes that keep some of the games I play from crapping out.
sorghum@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Yeah, if you really want a taste of Debian desktop, LMDE is probably where I’d start.
JustARegularNerd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Yep, been driving it for like 2 years on my study laptops. Only ever ran into a single issue that made the laptop unusable which was Tailscale DNS conflicting with the system’s DNS (been a while so don’t remember the exact details).
If you don’t need the latest stuff, aren’t doing anything needing the latest drivers and don’t really mess around with the shipped packages, it’s excellent for just working and being reliable.
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
I like it for desktop, but for me XFCE is all I need. I figure I want to mostly focus on the application I’m using not the Window Manager. I click the icon, application opens and I do stuff, and occassionally run apt update && apt upgrade and kinda forget the OS is even there.
With games I tend to have more issues with older games becoming broken after awhile than with new games not working because the OS is old. Only problems I’ve had with new games is because I had a computer that was >10 years old and eventually the hardware couldn’t run new games anymore. But then I mostly play strategy games and base builder games, so maybe that’s why I don’t have a lot of issues there.
Debian is the best OS for people that don’t want to think about the OS.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 1 day ago
So what distro do you use? I definitely am also considering gaming in the considerations.
CountVon@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Currently using Bazzite. Wanted something rolling release but I didn’t want to do extensive tinkering, and Bazzite ticked both boxes. Other distros I tried (PopOS, LMDE) struggled with my monitor layout. Main monitor is high refresh rate and VRR capable, secondary monitor is 60hz, not VRR capable, and it’s in portrait orientation. That combination is very not ideal for some window managers, as I discovered the hard way. I’m sure I could have fought through that on other distros, but it all worked out of the box with Bazzite.
Sunny@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
Juat wanted to chip in and say that PikaOS is a gaming specific OS based on Debian Testing. Been running it the last couple of months and been enjoying the heck out of it! wiki.pika-os.com/en/home