I agree with Loyal. Debian is a great learning experience.
Not all beginners want to be thrust into the commandline, but for those who do and who want to learn basics and be mentored by well schooled terminal users you would be well advised to give Debian a shot. There are other options such as Slackware, Gentoo and Arch, but Debian is a bigger toybox. It works on just about anything and it can be installed in the most number of ways. It has large repositories, a large community, and lots of online help. It is also a marketable skill to have because Debian is big on servers.
Debian stable is bulletproof as Loyal said. If stability is your goal and you do not mind rolling up your shirtsleeves and working under the hood then it is a worthwhile enterprise, even if you tick a few people off along the way.
I get that Debian users are heavily invested in their distribution and are deeply committed to software freedom. They just need to be more mindful of others and show respect to others, even in disagreement. If they could manage that then Debian would be more popular because they really have tried to make inroads in becoming more widely used. But it is still like joining the Borg, IMO. My points against Debian reflect my own bias based on my experience in that community. If you want warm fuzzies and ease of use go elsewhere, like Mint or Ubuntu.
My own opinion is that the easiest distros for beginners are Xubuntu, Kubuntu and Ubuntu, followed by Linux Mint (and that is only because it lacks an upgrade tool and it is too reliant on GNOME 3, both Cinnamon and Mate, which is flaky, IMO). If you want to venture into the RPM world then I recommend PCLinuxOS first and Mageia second. If you want to put the fun back into computing I recommend Arch. :)
Roy
On Tuesday, April 22, 2014 8:57:54 PM, Loyal Barber <loyal_barber@yahoo.com> wrote:
On 4/22/2014 5:13 PM, Linux Canuck wrote:
<snip>Simple answer. No.
Answer to number two is simpler: yes it is a rolling release.
Roy
I removed what Roy said not because I disagree but because I could not agree more. I did want to add a bit to what he said.
Is Debian good for beginners?
It depends on what the beginner's goal is. If it is to learn like a non-swimmer being thrown in water over his head as a way to learn swimming, then yes, it is great (sarcasm chip engaged). For most Newbies almost anything else would be better. See all of Roy's reasons.
Is Debian a rolling distro?
Yes.
An aside. I have experimented with Debian over the years. Just in 2013 did I use Debian for a production server. Before, I had used CentOS. I liked some things about Debian better than CentOS and therefore went that way. However, I have been working with Linux for quite a while and never before last year did I feel confident enough to put a Debian system into a production environment. That was Debian 6. Right now I have two servers with Debian 7.4 running as well as the Debian 6 server. My reason is simply that Debian for me has been bulletproof. I would not suggest getting into Debian until you are VERY comfortable with working from the command line and hand editing configuration files. Until then, I would stay away. I just set one of my servers GUI up to automatically log in. In Debian 7.4, one has to edit an XML type file to do that. On distros like *buntu, Linux Mint, or Zorin this process is easy. It can be done from the GUI. On Debian, no.
Loyal
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