This post is aimed at people who’ve maybe tried out a couple of Linux distros, and are looking for something to settle on long-term. I’m assuming some basic familiarity with the command line, but no real sysadmin skills.

Give Debian a try#

If you’ve been trying to pick a Linux distro, you’ll be aware that Debian is the grandparent of many of them. It has a reputation as a pro tool: Powerful and highly reliable, but also a bit difficult to approach.

Perhaps you’ve tried Ubuntu. It’s based on Debian, with some n00b-friendly packaging. That’s fine, except that in recent years, Ubuntu has acquired a bunch of habits that I’m not comfortable with: snaps as a package format that behaves weirdly, prominent links to Amazon, and so on. If I wanted all this creepy stuff on my computer, I could just run Windows.

So, when the time came to re-install an old laptop, I decided to give Debian another try.