I’m your regular end user. I use my computers to edit text, audio and video, watch movies, listen to music, post and bank on the internet…
my main computer uses now debian 12.5 after abandoning xubuntu.
For my backup notebook I have several candidates:
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Simply install debian 12.5 again, the easiest choice.
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Install linux mint, so I get ubuntu but without them throwing their subscription services down my throat. I’m unsure about other advantages, as ubuntu is debian based, maybe the more frequent program updates? Kernels are also updated more often than with debian as far as I know. Do you know of other advantages?
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Go for FreeBSD: this might require a learning curve, because this is an OS I’ve never used. Are commands that different from debian?
other more niche linux OSs seem too much a hassle and I guess won’t be as supported as the main ones.
If you want Debian with more frequent updates, consider going Debian sid. Base Debian is also fine, maybe with Flatpaks for more up-to-date applications where needed.
From your experience is it really unstable ( annoyingly buggy ), or do they just call it that and it stable really ?
Sid exclusively gets security updates through its package maintainers. The Debian Security Team only maintains security updates for the current “stable” release.
Is this a good thing ?
It is very usable, provided you pay attention to major upcoming changes. To give you a very recent example, during May they switched the time libraries to use 64 bits, and like others said, it was dependency hell until the tide of all the packages being recompiled passed. In those cases, unless you know EXACTLY what to do, it’s better to wait for updates to come in, let apt sort out what could be updated and what had to wait, and just make sure it doesn’t propose you to delete things. After 2 weeks it was all business as usual. Side note: aptitude (my package manager of choice) was unusable, while apt threaded on and pulled me out of the tangle.
