It’s my choice but Arch and its derivatives look like the trend like CachyOS which is #1 right now on visits on distrowatch. Also I’ve heard Google use Debian as gLinux and I feel many other giants also use it and sponsor it and I’m not comfortable choosing it as my distro. Can the sponsors togethwr with students or any other interested use it for their PCs, either coding or ordinary use? It strictly promotes free but worried about giants and sponsors.
Arch people tend to want people to know they use Arch (btw). You’ll also find a lot of posts about getting Arch working.
Debian people tend to be too busy doing other things on their computers besides getting them working, so you’ll hear about it less.
(Important: I’m not dumping on either distro here. Some people, myself included, like Arch exactly because it’s fun to play with and set up. Debian’s older packages tend to mean a more stable system. Use what you like.)
We have all the servers at work using Debian. It’s rock solid. I use Tumbleweed on home PC and CachyOS on laptop as I do some gaming and having fresh packages might help this. Both works for me.
Arch and its derivatives look like the trend
It’s because nobody writes “I use Debian BTW”.
I’ll start now: I use Debian BTW
I have Arch on my desktop, and all my laptops, but all of my servers run Debian. If you want your machine to have all the latest stuff, then Arch is great. If you want it to Just Work™ all the time without any concerns, Debian is great.
Or NixOS if you want both Debian’s stability and Arch’s rolling releases.
I have Arch on my desktop with the CachyOS repo enabled and the CachyOS kernel and also have all my servers running Debian.
It just works for me.
I am a Debian man. All my systems are Debian or Debian based. It just works!
Same here. I got installation media for Potato from a friend of a friend and I’ve been a happy user ever since. There’s been other stuff on my hardware too, and even now there’s (at least) LMDE and Bazzite around, but when I need a system which just works it’s Debian.
Good to know. It’s my distro choice.
It sounds like you’re concerned with EEE: embrace, extend, extinguish. While that might be a problem for centralized pieces of software, who are dependent upon revenue streams, core distros like Debian, Arch, Fedora, and openSUSE are developed and maintained by the community (and sponsors).
If sponsors all pulled their funding tomorrow, the projects would not suddenly cease to get updates. By extension, sponsors don’t get special seats at the table just for being a sponsor; it’s not some corporate buy-in where they get 5% voting share for donating $1M to fund hobbyists to work on the code full-time. Likewise, they don’t have special push access to inject “features” (read: enshittification) into the codebase that will eventually hamstring the code. Somebody would notice a bad pull-request and say something.
And even if they miraculously did, the codebase is open source. There are enough motivated people in the world who would fork the code into something free and open again. It’s one of the biggest strengths of FOSS.
Sponsorships help the development happen faster, but sponsors are not the drivers of Linux—we are. Choose the distro you like, and enjoy!
Then why sponsor?
As a sidenote, you might be asking why sponsors would give money to these projects:
- Tax write-off. Many projects are governed by nonprofits, and giving to them gives businesses a tax break.
- They get a better codebase for their own use. If they invest money, they’ll also be getting volunteer labor for free, so it’s win-win.
My wife uses Debian and is very happy with it.
She uses it both for gaming and studio recordings with Ardour.Debian has for decades been among the most respected distros in the Linux world, and it still is.
If you want something solid, Debian should be your first choice.Edit PS:
She also uses it for programming occasionally. Debian is an excellent platform for “coding” with its huge repositories.
But most Linux distros are very good for programming, and will have all the common necessary tools readily available.She uses it both for gaming and studio recordings with Ardour.
How is the gaming experience on Debian nowadays? Last time I tried it (several years ago now), it was kind of a nightmare jumping through all of the various hoops required to get it to pay nicely with an Nvidia GPU.
Good to know I just can’t help it cuz I hate Arch and CachyOS. I dont like their websites either.
debian has been my first choice since the 90s, but i use arch’s excellent wiki all the time.
Personally I prefer an Arch derivative, and neither of us can convince the other. 😋
However we both see the merits of “the other side”, we just have different preferences. But we also have some fun with it if some times. 😎
Debian has been our choice for web hosting for the last fifteen years, and my choice of desktop PC for the last three without issue.
Most games run out of the box with proton, if that’s your worry, and you can use heroic to get proton going with games from epic and gog with reasonable ease. Wine in general, for me, has had better luck running old legacy windows programs better than windows can manage these days.
I wouldn’t take Debian’s stability and reliability over anything; I can do everything I need with it.
rought 15-ish years ago stack exchange did a survey of distros used in production and debian was the king back then; it would be interesting to see what it’s like now-a-days.
I tried Debian when I built my PC back in 2025. It didn’t have any support for the bleeding edge parts I chose.
I then tried LMDE as a compromise. It also didn’t have the support I needed.
It’s a little too stable for my use-case… but runs well on my older laptops.
Maybe Debian is not for gaming?
Nah, this wasn’t an issue with gaming. This was just that the parts were new. The motherboard I chose used a 2024 chipset that Debian didn’t recognize. Basic stuff like detecting drives and outputting video beyond VESA standards was busted because of it. It took around 6 more months until Trixie came out with support.
DistroWatch isn’t an OS ranking system, its a “How many hits” or " “how many recent users claimed to use” a certain system.
This has no real correlation to actual deployed OS in the world.
It’s more of a buzz ranking; like a lot of people went to Debian recently because of Canonical being a less disrable OS builder. So Distrowatch got a ton of Debian searches at the beginning of that switch, but probably way less now.
Debian is perfect in particular for work. Stable, free, capable. Hardly more to want. And it’s been almost the only stable bedrock in my tech career of over two decades. I’ve probably made over a million USD with it, while everything else eventually gets taken by a corporation and becomes folly to build on. Free software forever
Only dislike I have with Debian is upgrading it was always a headache, but I think rolling release just suits me more.
Its a great distro
ymmv, but debian has always been near perfect through upgrades for me: even a recent buster -> bullseye -> bookworm -> trixie went smoothly.
issues usually arise from not maintaining a clean debian stable install (e.g. you were using backports or lots of 3rd party repos). if those are cleaned up prior things still usually go well.
not saying you didn’t have issues, but in my experience with with lots and lots of debian systems, upgrades have been 99.9% cakewalk.
Yep millions of us.
Most commonly due to stability.
Long term. It took effort and understanding to add newer versions of programs to it. Those of us with these skills managed. But it put off a lot of we want/need the latest without effort folks.
Over the last 10 years. Flat pack or appimage have come far enough. It is rare if ever I need to build any software I don’t want to.
Yeah stability is also the reason for Debian. Arch has more maintenance unlike Debian’s set it and forget it. Like Windows right? Fedora looks heavy to me though. I wanna try others too thats not win11.
In my understanding, Linux distros have different flavors and play in different arenas. For instance, there are “community-driven” distros like Debian, Arch, or Gentoo, and there are other “industry-driven” distros that are developed by companies, such as Fedora or Ubuntu. Another aspect to consider is the support for new software. With Arch and similar distros you get support for bleeding edge software, whereas Debian supports more stable releases and officially supports older version of softwares that have been tested and reliable. Then there are a myriad of other things to consider, including the Desktop Environment, using X11 or Wayland, SystemD, support for graphics cards, etc…
I wouldn’t care much about who uses it, but about who takes the decisions. In this case, Debian has a very open system that you can check on their website. I think that corporate interests such as what Google or Microsoft want don’t have a space in the Debian decision-making processes. I tend to trust more the community-driven distros and stable releases, so Debian does the trick for me.
You described the basics, anyway, some universities use it as their OS, no giant techs involved.
