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.
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.
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.
Nvidia drivers do not always play nice with the kernel, and can disrupt high end audio use. If you use Linux you should use an AMD or Intel GPU.
My wife used to use Nvidia, because it worked better for some games, but she finally ended up getting pissed with the proprietary Nvidia drivers, and switched to AMD about a year ago. And now all her games that used to work with Nvidia drivers also work with AMD.
AFAIK Debian support Nvidia proprietary drivers reasonably well today, but for older Nvidia cards you may be out of luck, they can be a real shitshow to get to work if you want to use the proprietary driver.
Best option is to just stop using Nvidia on Linux!
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. 😎