Hi SamI would whole heartedly recommend Debian. The problem with the other distros like Ubuntu, Fedora etc that try to be on the bleeding edge is that they tend to be buggy (and often slower) and each time a new release come out upgrading tends to break everything, and becasue they work on such a short life cycle (6 months between releases no matter what) you have to keep upgrading to get the latest security fixes etc but the 6 monthly deadline means stuff gets released before its ready. Theyre great distros for developers who want to test out the latest technology but theyre not suited for desktop 'everyday' use even though unfortunatly thats how they market them, and I think Linux's reputation as a whole suffers as a result.
Debian is a rock solid distro, after many years of using Linux on servers and the desktop and trying (and getting frustrated by) Fedora, Ubuntu & Linux Mint I've settled on Debian and found it to be pure quality.
Ive not had any problems with hardware compatability (unlike Linux Mint & Fedora which Ive had headaches with to do with graphics) and as for not having the latest technology, its not that out of date, and what would you rather have - the absolute latest version which no one has tested (you're the tester!) or a version slightly behind the cutting edge which has been tried, tested and fixed?
With regards to Firefox & Flash, I run the binary version of both which you can get from the firefox & adobe websites and they work together great.
i would avoid gnash (the free reverse engineered flash implementation that debian and many linux distros ship) like the plague - its buggy and basically just doesnt work, in fact I would remove it as soon as youve installed Debian (run apt-get remove gnash as root from the command line).
you might need to manually install the fimware packages for some of your hardware with Debian (its not installed by default) which you dont need to do with other distros but its not difficult and the end result is worth it.
Hope that helps Andrew On 24/11/11 11:43, Sam Vagni wrote:
Hello everyone, I just want to go into Linux, coming from Windows XP. Just want to know if Debian is good to go with and learn then? Just to clear my doubts that head people saying about its' non-compatibility with the newest hardware and not having latest technology, is it a myth? Further, I hope I can use easily Flash, Java, etc.. if Firefox if I install and go with Debian.... Thanks for the suggestions, SAM