[PlatoIsADisease]

To be fair, no one should be using Ubuntu. They are the free CD people from the 2000s. They are the Apple of Linux, marketing wins, but low quality.

They used outdated linux (Debian-family) because its lower cost to maintain.

All around, never use debian-family outside servers. Fedora is the future. Maybe OpenSUSE too. (Note these are not Arch or related to Arch)

[bayindirh]

> They used outdated linux (Debian-family) because its lower cost to maintain.

Ubuntu forks Sid, and evolves from there. They don't downstream Debian Stable.

> All around, never use debian-family outside servers. Fedora is the future. Maybe OpenSUSE too. (Note these are not Arch or related to Arch)

Daily driving Debian stable on servers and Testing on desktops for more than two decades. Testing is a rolling distribution and you install it once (ever). The only time I reinstalled it was to migrate to 64 bit architecture back in the day.

Also, considering stable to stable upgrades take 5 minutes, I have no problems with Debian Stable, either.

Fedora is nice, but it's RedHat's lab. While I have nothing against them, it's not user oriented as much as it looks. Debian Testing is much more stable than many (if not almost all) of the alternative distros, and follows versions reasonably well.

IF I want cutting edge, I can go Arch or Gentoo way. Lastly, Debian is an iceberg. Looks simple from outside, and once you start to develop it, you understand why Debian is considered one of the golden standards. The underbelly is a rich ecosystem of very well designed yet simple subsystems.

[KronisLV]

>> All around, never use debian-family outside servers. Fedora is the future.

That take in of itself also feels... uncommon?

My experience matches yours more or less, I've run both Debian (and their LTS project version at one point) and Ubuntu LTS on my servers, both have been generally okay, albeit with a snag or two along the way.

https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/debian-and-grub-are-broken

https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/debian-updates-are-broken

https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/ubuntu-lts-is-broken

Aside from a few cases of not-very-serious configurations with off the shelf hardware having issues that I get to write the occasional rant about (back when I had an "Everything is broken" section in my blog), it's been surprisingly stable otherwise.

I've had far more issues with RHEL-compatible distros (hate that they killed CentOS, Oracle Linux is sometimes weird but kinda works, outside of work stuff I'd personally reach for Rocky Linux which is a nicer experience) both when it comes to running stuff like Docker (way before Podman was even stable, RHEL-compatibles didn't play nicely with Docker when it came to SELinux and networking) and also support for slightly more uncommon consumer hardware, like my netbook touchpad didn't work at all by default on Fedora, but did work on DEB distros.

The 10 year EOL is really nice, though, and if they had something as nice as Proxmox (for free), I'd probably be using RPM distros for my hypervisors right now!

That's also kind of why I think saying that either of those don't have much of a future would be an odd statement - in my experience, both have their occasional issues but are still generally good for desktop and server use cases.

As an addendum, however, snaps suck, viva la Linux Mint for desktop, plus, Cinnamon is a nice desktop and it's still close enough to Ubuntu LTS I run on servers if I ever need that familiarity in regards to packages!

[fragmede]

other than systems, that is

[pjmlp]

Once upon a time Mandrake was great for consumer hardware, alongside SuSE, both kind of ignored nowadays, then came Ubuntu, which no one apparently should be using.

So we're kind of left out of options, because there is hardly another distro on Distrowatch that has a similar success rate being installed on random laptops that normies want to try GNU/Linux on.