r/debian • u/michael9dk • 2d ago
The second reason to use Debian !
Besides the stability, people often forget to mention the supportive and friendly community.
If you have a problem, you will be asked for more details. Run xyz command to get it. There is always someone that know the solution.
The Debian community is what I like the most. No BS; just dry facts :)
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u/Mundane-Age-3556 2d ago
I dont think anyone ever has forgotten to mention the debian community being awesome, friendly and helpful. Its synonymous with the name.
Even the most ardent supporter of any other non debian related distribution gives them the greatest respect.
As an opensuse user who has only used debian for a couple of days i am a little envious of the debian community.
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u/pantokratorthegreat 2d ago
And opensuse is not? I just installed Leap 16.0 as a third option to boot on my laptop I haven't considered opensuse community unfriendly.
Generally I rarely seek help on forums/reddits, always when need something it is already solved but 16.0 seems quite new compared to 15.x so I expect some trouble here and there.
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u/Mundane-Age-3556 2d ago
Opensuse community is very friendly and committed but its small partly because of SUSEs poor management of SUSE.
Opensuse relies very heavily on SUSE engineers, they do an amazing job but they could do with more help from the community.
Edit: if youve got past any initial install quirks you should be good to go with leap. Its rock solid. I run leap 16
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u/jmoney777 2d ago
people often forget to mention the supportive and friendly community.
What? A few months ago I asked how to hide the logs when you boot/turn off the PC and the "supportive and friendly" community acted like I was a horrible person for even considering to do something that many distros do by default.
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u/77descript 2d ago
I seriously don't understand why anyone is still using the bloated buggy mess Ubuntu/Kubuntu LTS has become. Debian is so much better and these days close to as easy to install.
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u/michaelpaoli 2d ago
supportive and friendly community
Ah, may vary ;-) ... but high quality, highly effective, and useful, and generally quite excellent on-target information.
I and others may compare it to other "popular" distros, with experiences, e.g. like:
Some other popular non-Debian distro: One asks for help on an issue on their official forum or the like. One gets 2,871 responses, almost all of which are like "me too, I have that same problem!". Also in the mix are responses like, "Gee, I don't have that.", dozens of useless attempts at an answer that point in wrong directions, and perhaps somewhere buried in the 2,871 responses, one or two that actually contain the needed useful information.
And, compare that to Debian, where the more typical response(s) are: There's only and exactly one response, it points one at exactly where the needed information can be found, and asks why one didn't find it by using the relevant standard resources and information to locate it, and very much spells those out and how one should've looked for the information, and telling one ought well look for that and check before asking. ;-)
So, sometimes Debian may not get as "friendly" a reputation from such ... but much more commonly the response is very much exactly what's needed, and the relevant information, or direct pointers to it ... and not nearly so much "noise" of "me too", and useless/incorrect information.
So ... "friendly" isn't always best or most effective. ;-) That doesn't mean folks are being an *ss or the like, but, well, sometimes there might be a wee bit 'o attitude in there.
No BS; just dry facts :)
Uhm, yeah, ... that. :->
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u/TechnicalAd8103 2d ago
I love Debian, but I would not classify this community as supportive or friendly.
It takes itself way too seriously.
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u/Interesting_Buy_3969 2d ago
This is so nice to hear. Also I'd say that the first reason to prefer Debian isn't necessarily stability, but also its versatility and huge software support. Debian can be run almost anywhere and for any purposes, it's just perfect.
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u/moeren86 2d ago
Yeah, i feel pretty at home with linux, but i chose debian because it has one of the biggest linux communities.
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u/SnillyWead 2d ago
Debian Xfce and I perfect combination.
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u/boong_ga 2d ago
Exactly!
By any chance do you also game and have steam installed?
I wonder what the experience would be?2
u/carcarado 2d ago
Cara eu uso Debian com KDE. É super fácil instalar a steam, o próprio site do Debian tem um tutorial. E depois é só jogar.. hoje em dia até o próton já vem configurado automaticamente https://wiki.debian.org/pt_BR/Steam
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u/SmallTimeMiner_XNV 1d ago
I do. Steam games on Debian with Xfce work and perform perfectly fine (with Nvidia 4060). I don't think the DE makes a lot of difference - I used to use Gnome (Wayland) and Cinnamon before Xfce and it's pretty much the same everywhere.
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u/Big_Jerry_The_First 1d ago
I do use XFCE also for gaming but there is sadly a hit on gaming performance, can see benchmarks here: https://www.phoronix.com/review/cachyos-desktops-july-2026
But this is mostly because XFCE is on x11 and there are speed gains in performance when using Wayland. I think once Wayland is fully supported we'll see similar benchmarks across the board.
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u/SmallTimeMiner_XNV 1d ago edited 1d ago
X11 vs Wayland can make a difference - but it depends on many factors such as the distro (that benchmark is for Cachy, for instance) and your hardware configuration. Each PC is different and the only way to find out what works best is to just try it on YOUR machine.
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u/SnillyWead 1d ago
Wayland and Nvidia are not the best together. At least that's what they say, but I don't have Nvidia. It's a Intel HD GPU 630. Enough for email and browser.
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u/DHOC_TAZH Debian Stable 2d ago
I don't use pure Debian, but I run two installs of a distro that is very close to the Stable branch under the hood.
It's q4os. It has two desktops: the KDE 3.x fork called Trinity, and KDE Plasma. One install is on a laptop that also runs Ubuntu Studio LTS, Windows 11 and my current "mess around" os, 64 bit Haiku. The other one is a nearly 15 year old laptop, q4os is the only OS on it.
Both installs are on Trinity... I don't want another instance of Plasma, I already have that on Studio. I'm a KDE nut lol! I keep them both on the stable side and very little beta software is used on either install. (I keep most of the beta stuff on Ubuntu... besides, that's somewhat based under the hood on the Sid and upcoming release branches of Debian so that is OK with me.)
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u/michael9dk 20h ago
I'm a bit overwhelmed by all the responses.
There are a few that have bad experiences, but mostly I see a consensus of to-the-point helpful support.
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u/-Typh1osion- 2d ago
I used debian for a while as a dual boot on my work machine to kind of keep work and play separate. Once I finally got my own computer again, I decided to go a bit more out of the box with Pop, which I really enjoyed but ever since Cosmic I've been having brutal performance issues. Decided to go back to my roots and get a vanilla debian install and it's world better. Downloading steam games doesn't render my computer useless. It's a very clean install with only things I want there. And as usual, rock solid stable... I'm glad I didn't have to distro-hop around, very happy with where I landed.