A few days ago I installed Debian Stable. I’d been using Sparky Linux, which is based on Debian Testing, and was happy with it. The tools it integrates make the life of a desktop user easier when managing the system, I had no issues with it and had a bunch of software available in the repositories.
Well, since Sparky is based on Debian, the “bunch of software available in the repositories” part was a given from the start.
Although happy, I was looking for an operating system a bit more conservative in terms of stability and reliability. I’d been inspired very recently by the short OpenBSD usage I had on a virtual machine and some readings about BSD systems, so I thought Debian Stable would be the best choice.
Here are my motives for choosing Debian over, say, CentOS or Slackware or even a BSD system:
- It’s a Linux kernel based operating system and I’ve been mostly using Debian Testing or Debian-based systems for over a decade, so I’m familiar with it;
- It prioritizes stability over the latest stable version of a software;
- It has a lot of software available;
- It has a very large community.
Almost a week went by and my fears of using older versions of any software (motivated almost exclusively by a potential lack of some functionality) are gone. The system is really stable and I have almost all the tools I need in the repositories. I only needed to install a handfull of apps from external sources (deb-multimedia, github, flatpak and snap) because they were not packaged in the distro’s repositories.