Hey dust, I have been using linux for about 24 years ago and I’m gonna explain it to you straight here.
debian is rock solid. It’s great for servers. It’s also great for laptops: That is laptops where you don’t really care about having anything bleeding edge. I need tmux, a few compilers, vim, and a browser. Debian!
I’ve got a kid and get at best 45 minutes per week to code on side projects. My system can never be broken. I use Debian on my Linux laptop and my droplet server. No surprises.
But if you want to occasionally get a brand new desktop environment hot off the presses, Debian‘s gonna work against you. I think Ubuntu mint is great.
Yah, I installed it a couple weeks ago, it was on Plasma 5.27 or something almost as old, and installing strange software or drivers is such a pain in the ass. Lasted a couple days, like I usually do when I try NixOS every few months. Ah, well.
24.05 brought plasma 6, The problem is, Wayland made a whole bunch of my stuff no longer work updates for those packages are slow to make it through Nix.
Yep… Mint is always following the current LTE version of Ubuntu, usually behind them by a couple months, which is going to be a few months to a year behind on most packages at the time of release, and will be another two years before getting a new feature update
Anything not system level (such as the DE), if you want the latest, Flatpak. Anything else, your options are to wait a few years, try to shoehorn it in yourself and deal with the dependency hell, or hop to a distro that uses the version you want.
Even the latest version of Mint that just released about a month ago doesn’t have KDE 6 yet, and it’ll probably be two years before it’s available. Which is why I’m thinking of switching to Fedora for a while.
Hey dust, I have been using linux for about 24 years ago and I’m gonna explain it to you straight here.
debian is rock solid. It’s great for servers. It’s also great for laptops: That is laptops where you don’t really care about having anything bleeding edge. I need tmux, a few compilers, vim, and a browser. Debian!
I’ve got a kid and get at best 45 minutes per week to code on side projects. My system can never be broken. I use Debian on my Linux laptop and my droplet server. No surprises.
But if you want to occasionally get a brand new desktop environment hot off the presses, Debian‘s gonna work against you. I think Ubuntu mint is great.
Good luck
Mint? No. Also rock solid but not of the bleeding edge.
Arch and NixOS is where it’s at if you want bleeding edge.
Other than that sgharms is completely right, OP.
I’ve been running NixoOS for about a year now
NixOS is definitely hit or miss on bleeding edge. The archive is absolutely massive but it is in no way universally up to date.
They just got Wayland in in the last update.
It needs more maintainers and it’s a royal pain in the ass to fix anything if it’s actually broken.
Yah, I installed it a couple weeks ago, it was on Plasma 5.27 or something almost as old, and installing strange software or drivers is such a pain in the ass. Lasted a couple days, like I usually do when I try NixOS every few months. Ah, well.
24.05 brought plasma 6, The problem is, Wayland made a whole bunch of my stuff no longer work updates for those packages are slow to make it through Nix.
Yep… Mint is always following the current LTE version of Ubuntu, usually behind them by a couple months, which is going to be a few months to a year behind on most packages at the time of release, and will be another two years before getting a new feature update
Anything not system level (such as the DE), if you want the latest, Flatpak. Anything else, your options are to wait a few years, try to shoehorn it in yourself and deal with the dependency hell, or hop to a distro that uses the version you want.
Even the latest version of Mint that just released about a month ago doesn’t have KDE 6 yet, and it’ll probably be two years before it’s available. Which is why I’m thinking of switching to Fedora for a while.
openSUSE Tumbleweed if you want bleeding edge also