alt Hacker NewsWriting this from my Debian system, it's a great distro that has been excellent to me as a daily driver. I switched to Debian 6 after Ubuntu went way downhill and haven't had cause to regret it.
I like Debian's measured pragmatism with ideology, how it's a distro of free software by default but it also makes it easy to install non-free software or firmware blobs. I like Debian's package guidelines, I like dpkg, I like the Debian documentation even if Arch remains the best on that front. I like the stable/testing package streams, which make it easy to choose old but rock-stable vs just a bit old and almost as stable.
And one of the best parts is, I've never had a Debian system break without it being my fault in some way. Every case I've had of Debian being outright unbootable or having other serious problems, it's been due to me trying to add things from third-party repositories, or messing up the configuration or something else, but not a fault of the Debian system itself.
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Yeah, I ditched Ubuntu Server after too many upgrade headaches. I manage 75+ VPS instances for app hosting, and it's nerve-wracking doing maintenance updates knowing there's a chance one won't boot after. That's easily an extra 1-2 hours per VPS just to get it back. Switched to Debian back in the 8.x days in 2015 and it's been smooth sailing. Never had it break unless I was the one who messed it up.
The only thing I can say against Debian is that it tends to start new server software immediately after install, before I have a chance to configure it properly. Defaults are sane for most packages, but, still, it scares me a little. In that I like the Red Hat approach of installing and leaving it off until I decide to turn it on.
> And one of the best parts is, I've never had a Debian system break without it being my fault in some way. Every case I've had of Debian being outright unbootable or having other serious problems, it's been due to me trying to add things from third-party repositories, or messing up the configuration or something else, but not a fault of the Debian system itself.
You're not trying hard enough ;-)
I have Debian on an old MacBook Pro and had it on an even older iMac, and I've had a few problems over the years. Always with proprietary drivers - WiFi, graphics, webcams, etc. - Apple really don't want people using free software on their hardware. There's always been a fix, but there have been a few stressful moments and hoops to jump through.
But it's definitely my favorite distro, and I run it everywhere I can. Pretty much always "just works" anywhere but Apple.
> after Ubuntu went way downhill and haven't had cause to regret it.
In what way Ubuntu went downhill?
> I like dpkg, I like the Debian documentation even if Arch remains the best on that front.
That's curious, because when I was learning to make Debian packages, I found the official documentation to be far better than I had seen from any other distro. The Policy Manual in particular is very detailed, continually improving, and even documents incremental changes from each version to the next. (That last bit makes it easy for package maintainers to keep up with current best practices.)
Does Arch have something better in this department?
Are you perhaps comparing the Arch wiki to Debian's wiki? On that front I would agree with you.
> I've never had a Debian system break without it being my fault in some way.
My experience has been contrary to that. I'm a Linux user of 25+ years with various distros but about half of that time with Debian as my main desktop. I broke up with Debian about ten years ago thinking we could still be friends, but every time I've tried to put it on a new box it since then something weird has happened, most recently about a month ago on a completely new Intel N150, when it gave me some stick about video modes. Today my laptop got hosed by an attempted upgrade from bookworm to trixie, as in tons of error messages and then no more docker and no more virtualbox. No harm done because Debian taught me long ago to store a copy of the whole root filesystem on external media before an upgrade, but now the clock is ticking until I have to migrate off it or get stuck with something too old to be compatible with anything.
> I like Debian's measured pragmatism with ideology
There is plenty that could be said of Debian but as far as I’m concerned that’s not part of it.
Debian patches software for purely ideological reasons because they think they are not free enough. That’s not pragmatism. That’s the reverse of pragmatism. It certainly is a real drag on the teams developing the software they try to ship.
You weren't around for when they broke the OpenSSL random number generator for no good reason. That was back in 2008 and it created vulnerabilities that persist to this day. https://16years.secvuln.info/
I still use Debian but it's hard to forget stuff like that even after all these years.
> And one of the best parts is, I've never had a Debian system break without it being my fault in some way.
https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/debian-updates-are-broken
https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/debian-and-grub-are-broken
Then again, I’ve had most software occasionally break, I’m thankful that Debian exists.
Debian is my foundation. I keep servers on Old Stable and test new release features on an ephemeral system.
I learned nftables with Bookworm and labwc with Trixie.
labwc supports Wayland with Openbox configuration.
I think this is all true, but the "being my fault" part has gotten better for me with nixos. Broke it? just reboot into the previous version and get configuration.nix back from git. I had to reinstall exactly once in 2016 shortly after the first install, but I don't know what I did wrong. the third time I installed nixos was last week when I bought a new computer that came with Windows.
I've been always a Fedora person, still am. But my PC moved to Proxmox (debian) in 2023. Now a Fedora Atomic sits in a VM running flatpaks and podman containers :D
You don't mention say what you like specifically about Debian, most of what you wrote could be said for a lot of distributions.
So here is what I _don't_ like about Debian :-)
- I don't like Debian package tooling (dpkg, debootstrap, de build...). Actually I hate everything about the experience of Debian packaging. Every time I package for Debian, I end up with a messed up setup of chroots and have to make triple sure nothing leaked from my environment.
- Debian has a habit of repackaging everything at their own sauce, disregarding upstream philosophy. Debian packages will have their own microcosm of configuration directories, defaults, paths, etc. orthogonal to what a pristine installation look like.
- Debian has the annoying habit of default starting installed services. So you always have to dance around your configuration management to disable services, install them, configure them, then restart them.
Do you usually update in place or do a fresh install whenever a new major version comes out?
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>I've never had a Debian system break without it being my fault in some way.
Debian is great but I can't say this is a shared experience. In particular, I've been bitten by Debian's heavy patching of kernel in Debian stable (specifically, backport regressions in the fast-moving DRM subsystem leading to hard-to-debug crashes), despite Debian releases technically having the "same" kernel for a duration of a release. In contrast, Ubuntu just uses newer kernels and -hwe avoids a lot of patch friction. So I still use Debian VMs but Ubuntu on bare metal. I haven't tried kernel from debian-backports repos though.