On 11/14/21 4:56 AM, Thanos Katsiolis wrote:
Hello, I am new to the Debian distribution and I would like to hear opinions from experienced users on why someone should choose them as OS. The reasons I chose them is that Debian is considered a stable and reliable OS (the policy of the OS is not to include as many and as much quickly as possible new features), and that it has a large and dependable community.
It would help if you described your computing environment, what you plan to do with Debian, and what criteria are important to you.
I have a SOHO network with various computers and devices running Windows, macOS, Debian, FreeBSD, Android, iOS, Raku, and other embedded OS's. I chose Debian with Xfce for desktops and laptops because it mostly works OOTB on most x86-64 machines. I chose FreeBSD for servers because the BSD license and CDDL are compatible, so FreeBSD fully supports OpenZFS OOTB.
Over the years, Debian Stable, Old Stable, and Old Old Stable have been reasonably stable ("code does not change") and reliable ("computer does not malfunction"). I typically run Old Stable or Old Old Stable -- currently, Debian 10 and 9.
Unfortunately, over the past year or so, Debian with Xfce and my typical set of desktop applications (Firefox, Thunderbird, Thunar, and Terminal) have become unreliable. I experience intermittent, random mouse and/or keyboard events that jump the mouse pointer, select regions of the screen, resize, move, and close windows, activate pop-up dialogs, etc.. The problem is more frequent on Debian 10 than on Debian 9. The malfunctions seem to come in storms, and I have yet to find a way to trigger them. I need to try Debian 11.
The last time I ran FreeBSD with Xfce as a daily driver (4+ years ago), it took a non-trivial amount of work to set up and the result was lacking features and panel items that were included with Debian. So, I went back to Debian.
As for community, I participate in the debian-user mailing list and the freebsd-questions mailing list. The FreeBSD list seems to have more people with computer science education. The Debian list tends to have more digressions. The users on both are reasonably helpful.
David