Linux

Debian on my server, my desktop, my laptop, and my gaming computer. That last one might be the most questionable choice, but so far it has been working well.

Just works. No issues.

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.

They use Debian for the same reason all heavy industry is built using steel and not whatever flashy new composite is in the news today. It works. Debian is slightly harder than Ubuntu / Mint to install and set-up, but probably the easiest to maintain since it is extremely stable and forgiving. It will also work on just about any hardware.

And don't worry about the sponsorships. Debian is run by the community; the sponsers don't get to decide anything.

I use Debian. It just works and is reliable.

debian on servers all the way, since 2000

I’m sure Debian would implode if any big corp started to make “hostile” changes to it. It was by some considered controversial to include non free firmware by default - that should tell you a little about how much people care about Debian, as including the non free by default is against the core of opensource.

i have debian on my server; if i could go back and use it on my desktop and laptop instead of mint i would too (nothing against mint just love debian)

I use PikaOS, which is based on Debian. It's right up there with CachyOS is performance and gaming, and have been using it for over a year with its hyprland variant.

I personally use DietPI on my headless servers, which is a derivative of debian, and PikaOS on my personal computer, which is the bazzite equivalent of debian. It’s great really :). At this stage, i've been so used to debian derivatives that I simply don’t want to use time to learn another distro's specific ways. I've tried mandrake and rpm years ago, but debian simply was the golden standard I used at school and on PI.

Arch and its derivatives look like the trend

It's because nobody writes "I use Debian BTW".

Arch people tend to want people to know they use Arch (btw). You'll also find a lot of posts about getting Arch working.

Debian people tend to be too busy doing other things on their computers besides getting them working, so you'll hear about it less.

I am a Debian man. All my systems are Debian or Debian based. It just works!

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.

Pretty much anything I do is Debian, ive said it quite a bit before so this may be a repeat of previous comments, but...

Its solid, stable, easy to deploy with incredible flexibility and just about everything out there supports it. I do have a few boxes with arch, and they are also just fine - I wouldn't use it as a server, personally, but its perfectly good for a "very current" approach to desktops/laptops.

I have Arch on my desktop, and all my laptops, but all of my servers run Debian. If you want your machine to have all the latest stuff, then Arch is great. If you want it to Just Work™ all the time without any concerns, Debian is great.

I use Debian on all my servers and virtual machines due to its slow update cadence and leanness.

It sounds like you're concerned with EEE: embrace, extend, extinguish. While that might be a problem for centralized pieces of software, who are dependent upon revenue streams, core distros like Debian, Arch, Fedora, and openSUSE are developed and maintained by the community (and sponsors).

If sponsors all pulled their funding tomorrow, the projects would not suddenly cease to get updates. By extension, sponsors don't get special seats at the table just for being a sponsor; it's not some corporate buy-in where they get 5% voting share for donating $1M to fund hobbyists to work on the code full-time. Likewise, they don't have special push access to inject "features" (read: enshittification) into the codebase that will eventually hamstring the code. Somebody would notice a bad pull-request and say something.

And even if they miraculously did, the codebase is open source. There are enough motivated people in the world who would fork the code into something free and open again. It's one of the biggest strengths of FOSS.

Sponsorships help the development happen faster, but sponsors are not the drivers of Linux—we are. Choose the distro you like, and enjoy!

I mean I run one arch machine but have 10 ish Debian machines.

We have all the servers at work using Debian. It's rock solid. I use Tumbleweed on home PC and CachyOS on laptop as I do some gaming and having fresh packages might help this. Both works for me.

Yep millions of us.

Most commonly due to stability.

Long term. It took effort and understanding to add newer versions of programs to it. Those of us with these skills managed. But it put off a lot of we want/need the latest without effort folks.

Over the last 10 years. Flat pack or appimage have come far enough. It is rare if ever I need to build any software I don't want to.

Debian is perfect in particular for work. Stable, free, capable. Hardly more to want. And it's been almost the only stable bedrock in my tech career of over two decades. I've probably made over a million USD with it, while everything else eventually gets taken by a corporation and becomes folly to build on. Free software forever

Only dislike I have with Debian is upgrading it was always a headache, but I think rolling release just suits me more.

Its a great distro

I currently use LMDE, yes. I just have spent too much time on the programs I already installed to move on from it I guess. Nothing's come up. It Just Works™ and the wife loves it

Heard some stuff about them introducing bugs via the downstream patching system though? All that package management stuff is a bit over my head.

I tried Debian when I built my PC back in 2025. It didn't have any support for the bleeding edge parts I chose.

I then tried LMDE as a compromise. It also didn't have the support I needed.

It's a little too stable for my use-case... but runs well on my older laptops.

Debian has been our choice for web hosting for the last fifteen years, and my choice of desktop PC for the last three without issue.

Most games run out of the box with proton, if that's your worry, and you can use heroic to get proton going with games from epic and gog with reasonable ease. Wine in general, for me, has had better luck running old legacy windows programs better than windows can manage these days.

I wouldn't take Debian's stability and reliability over anything; I can do everything I need with it.

DistroWatch isn't an OS ranking system, its a "How many hits" or " "how many recent users claimed to use" a certain system.

This has no real correlation to actual deployed OS in the world.

It's more of a buzz ranking; like a lot of people went to Debian recently because of Canonical being a less disrable OS builder. So Distrowatch got a ton of Debian searches at the beginning of that switch, but probably way less now.

Rolling releases work well until they don't. Let the voluntary beta testers be as smug as they want to be. They are part of the Linux ecosystem who test and report bugs for fixing before they hit other distros.

They might have some performance benefits and if problems arise, there are ways to snapshot back to a working state, recover and many will be knowledgeable to fix some bugs themselves, but ask yourselves, do you actually want to go through all that?

Debian is perfectly fine for what it does.

it seems to be the most hassle free rock solid distro among the popular ones. i prefer slackware on my own systems though, but i'd install debian if someone asks me to install a linux distro on their system.

In my understanding, Linux distros have different flavors and play in different arenas. For instance, there are "community-driven" distros like Debian, Arch, or Gentoo, and there are other "industry-driven" distros that are developed by companies, such as Fedora or Ubuntu. Another aspect to consider is the support for new software. With Arch and similar distros you get support for bleeding edge software, whereas Debian supports more stable releases and officially supports older version of softwares that have been tested and reliable. Then there are a myriad of other things to consider, including the Desktop Environment, using X11 or Wayland, SystemD, support for graphics cards, etc...

I wouldn't care much about who uses it, but about who takes the decisions. In this case, Debian has a very open system that you can check on their website. I think that corporate interests such as what Google or Microsoft want don't have a space in the Debian decision-making processes. I tend to trust more the community-driven distros and stable releases, so Debian does the trick for me.

rought 15-ish years ago stack exchange did a survey of distros used in production and debian was the king back then; it would be interesting to see what it's like now-a-days.