this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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I distro hopped for a bit before finally settling in Debian (because Debian was always mentioned as a distro good for servers, or stable machines that are ok with outdated software)

And while I get that Debian does have software that isn't as up to date, I've never felt that the software was that outdated. Before landing on Debian, I always ran into small hiccups that caused me issues as a new Linux user - but when I finally switched over to Debian, everything just worked! Especially now with Debian 13.

So my question is: why does Debian always get dismissed as inferior for everyday drivers, and instead mint, Ubuntu, or even Zorin get recommended? Is there something I am missing, or does it really just come down to people not wanting software that isn't "cutting edge" release?

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[–] False@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

My example applied to all distros, the difference would be the time it takes that code change (which resolved a critical to me bug) takes to actually be available to use.

There's also very little that's specific to me about that, it's a real use case that comes up repeatedly for new releases that tend to push things graphically. I'm only going to recommend distros that minimize the time to get those fixes because it's a better user experience for the target demographic with little downside.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

I'm sorry but I might be totally out of the loop here, do gamers use Mesa? I thought proprietary drives from NVIDIA and AMD, sadly, was what most people actually used nowadays. Again to be clear I'm NOT saying it's a good thing (it's not!) just wondering what's the actual share of users relying on it.

Edit: oh, looks like Mesa is now the default for AMD "AMD promotes their Mesa drivers Radeon and RadeonSI over the deprecated AMD Catalyst" (via Wikipedia), then yes it's a big deal. Still makes me wonder what's the current share but mostly out of curiosity.

[–] False@lemmy.world 1 points 9 minutes ago

Mesa has been the defacto standard for AMD for years. It's always performed better than the official driver. AMD just made it their official recommendation recently.

I think Intel also uses Mesa, with Nvidia being the odd one out