Title pretty much says it all. I’ve been using ubuntu as my daily driver for the last 5 years or so and honestly, I’ve had a wonderful experience with it.
That said, with the way things are going, I feel like its only a matter of time before Canonical pulls the rug out so I’d like to at least get my feet wet with something other than Ubuntu and Debian seems like the logical choice.
I mainly use my machines for gaming, self hosting, programming, and weird networking projects/automation testing.
I’ve heard gaming on debian isnt as ‘out of the box’ as it is with Ubuntu. So I’m hoping somone with more experience can share some tips on what I should be looking out for or point me to some good guides. Thanks yall.
Allegedly they’ve gotten better about this recently, but historically, Debian suuuucked for hardware just via the kernel being too old. I was Debian for most things in the 2000’s and early 2010’s (now on Fedora for most things) and I’ve literally had to switch from a planned Debian setup for a server to an Ubuntu one because the kernel was too old to recognize the hard drive and I couldn’t get the process to install a custom newer kernel during install to work (and you kind of need hard drive support ON install). But like I said, allegedly it’s better now… good luck!
I always get screwed pretty hard with Debian drivers. Just the other day I updated my Debian server to Debian 12 and then it refused to allow my atheros 9k PCI wifi card to work unless I rebooted after a cold boot. After an entire afternoon, I got to where it wouldn’t work after a cold boot or after a reboot. I literally had to choose between buying a new wifi card or reinstalling Debian/a different distro.
I used to only use Debian for non-laptops but from now on I don’t think I’ll install any new Debian installations on anything.