When colleagues or friends think about breaking out of their walled garden environments, and are asking me which Linux distribution I could recommend, my answer is always the same – I recommend what I’m using myself since over 15 years, and that is Debian GNU/Linux.
Why? Well here someone lists 7 reasons. And having been inside the community myself a bit, I know that it’s simply the best no-nonsense non-commercial and free thing out there. Nothing else comes even close, so it even runs the ISS nowadays – and pretty much the rest of the world as well.
So there you have my recommendation, plus some arguments for it. Oh, and before I forget the most compelling argument: I run Debian just because it’s fun!
The current stable release of Debian while I write this is version 8.2, better known as “Jessie”:
Update from January 28th, 2016:
I’ve read and saved this one quite a while ago, but I just discovered it again. And it’s also a perfect good description of Debian and their package managing tool apt:
“It’s a 100% bug-free solution to all life’s problems, requiring no human intervention at any stage, and I especially love its rich chocolatey flavour”! – Justin B. Rye challenged with “I don’t think it is possible to over-sell APT” in a thread about how to describe Debian to new users
Thanks again for reading.
I used to run Debian on all my boxes few years ago. Currently I’m running Kubuntu on two machines (main PC workstation and laptop), Debian on another (virtualization PC) and CentOS (MPD and backup server) on the last one. Why Kubuntu? Mainly because many projects that I was intrested in had/have quite frequently updated repos with deb packages for Ubuntu. But all in all Ubuntu is also Debian based, so in fact I’m party Debian user too. 🙂
Almost forgot: Happy new year for you and your family Wolfgang! 🙂
Thanks colleague – and the same to you and to your family!