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sph | 4 years ago
These are all Ubuntu derivatives. I agree on the sentiment that there's a lot of push for obscure distributions, but it's worth trying the major ones. I recommend Fedora, it's another first-class distro for workstation and people that have work to do, and has nothing to do with Ubuntu or Debian at all.
Why I prefer Fedora to Ubuntu/Debian, in my personal opinion:
* Ubuntu GNOME is a frankenstein of patched GNOME software (some from GNOME 40, some from GNOME 3.38), Fedora is stock vanilla upstream GNOME.
* Maintainers of Debian and Ubuntu derivatives tend to be liberal with patching upstream software, often introducing bugs not present upstream. Fedora adopts an upstream-first approach (patch only if absolutely necessary)
* I'm not a fan of apt, rpm is slightly better
* Ubuntu snap is a dead man walking, often disabled on its own derivative distros (mint, pop_os, etc.), while Fedora/Redhat uses Flatpak which has first-party support pretty much everywhere and it's not under control of a single corporation like snap is.
* Red Hat actually pays people to work on major Linux user-space libraries (wayland, GNOME, pipewire, kernel development), while Ubuntu often goes its own way to create its own solutions that aren't adopted by anyone else.
* Fedora is probably the most stable bleeding-edge distribution, where the future of Linux is being promoted and tested slightly before than anyone else. We've got default Wayland, btrfs, a functional app store, pipewire, soon GNOME apps distributed as Flatpak.
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That said, Arch Linux is another worth exploring to learn how all Linux user-space fits together, has the best package manager and documentation in all the Linux world, but IMHO it's more for tinkering than having a rock solid workstation (I've used Arch for a decade before moving to Fedora)
blindmute|4 years ago
Been thinking I should just move to debian stable, but in the meantime I update things a lot less frequently than I did before