Hello, I wanna know which distro could be could for productivity (not gaming). Maybe a debian based one, I don’t know and I don’t care about the desktop env. Thx!
This is gonna be super far fetch, but hear me out… Debian…
THX
This gave me a good laugh
Just about any major distro.
There’s so many distro’s to choose from that can all be productive.
If the question is this short, my answer is too: Go try at least 10 and then come back to tell us what you liked and what not.
Without any further information it’s like going into a forest and asking people to point out a tree. Unless you look for some specific tree all will do…
Edit: Fat fingers
Linux mint Debian edition or Opensuse tumbleweed.
Slow Internet/less updates, older, more tested software, slightly wider package availability: LMDE.
Faster Internet, more updates, very new (but well tested) software, needs slightly more technical knowledge sometimes: Opensuse tumbleweed.
I personally use Opensuse Slowroll, which is a slower rolling release experimental version of Opensuse tumbleweed.
Ok thx
Throw a dart and use whatever it lands on. If you don’t have any actual requirements, they’re all pretty okay.
+1 for debian.
No need to mess around with debian derivatives for whatever pointless extra widgets they have.
It’s good enough for most stuff and has “allow nonfree drivers” choice which helps with annoying hardware problems of the past.If you don’t care about desktop env, you probably don’t care about wayland vs xorg either.
So I’d try XFCE, simple, basic, lightweight, fast, probably not the most modern or flashy,
but you’re getting to work faster.Check out MX (Debian + extra tools to make desktop use easier)
Depending on what you need for productivity, you’ll most likely be fine with just using flatpak to install any fresh packages.
Pretty much any distribution would meet that criteria.
Is just pick one and get going. If you run into problems, you’ll now have more specific selection criteria and can make a more discerning choice of another distribution.
Given your initial “maybe Debian” just grab Debian stable and see where it takes you.
Fedora is pretty good if you want a more up to date experience. Fedora Silverblue if you want fast atomic updates and just want to run flatpaks (or use a toolbox/distrobox for traditional packages or even overlay them completely). Otherwise Ubuntu has always felt like a very complete experience, just don’t get crypto wallets from the snap store.
Linux Mint EDGE
i cant say enough about mint. its handled all the nonsense ive thrown at it and then some.
Mint is my go to desktop option. It usually does the job.
I don’t usually worry about older packages. Most things run fine. I don’t spend a lot of time trying to make my UI pretty. For me, the GUI is a place for terminals, web browsers, my IDE, and general tools, not some kind of whiz bang thing to tweak all the time.
Debian: good enough and stable. No worries > new features.
I disagree with Debian because it has old packages and you will constantly have issues that are already fixed in the new versions. Specially if you run Plasma desktop or anything where lots of bugs are fixed constantly.
I think you will not have a great experience with Debian to be honest, but that being said, I have only ran it once for a few weeks. It was very frustrating for me to not have modern versions of software.
One guy below in the comments says he is happy with Gnome 43 which was released 18 months ago I believe. That’s what I’m talking about. You will lack almost two years of new features, bug fixes and improvements.
All this because people believe it’s more stable. But it’s not more stable at all, it’s just old already fixed bugs instead of new bugs.
You can get more updated packages by running debian testing, which is quite stable. Debian also is more stable. Security patches are still brought to the main release, making it secure. The stability comes from the lack of a lot of new updates which come with a lot of new bugs.
Use Debian or whatever your organization will support.
I’m a long time Mint user. My Mint laptop is my daily drive and it served me well even with my not IT related job during the pandemic home office days.
And it’s a 2nd gen i5 with 8 gb memory, it handled like a champ for 3d mechanical design.
Debian sid
Honestly if OP just wants straight up productivity, I’d go with stable. They won’t have to deal with constant updates and have a stable user experience for some time. They can use flatpak to have the latest and greatest productivity software if they need. But my guess is that one or one and a half year old LibreOffice/Inkscape/Gimp will be more than sufficient.
I’m gaming on Debian stable just fine. I don’t get what everyone’s thing with bleeding edge software all the time is. To me, “bleeding edge” means “higher chance for something to break and blow up in your face”.
I’ll wait until the bleeding edge distro users got hit with all the bugs first. My preferences were just justified by the recent xz backdoor stuff.
Debian stable will not work well on very new hardware. Other than that it is solid
Seems to work just fine on my 2022 Gigabyte brand mobo with a 12-core AM5 socket Ryzen and Nvidia 3070ti GPU. Maybe it has trouble on things like laptops, which often have weird shit put in by their manufacturers? Or are you defining “very new” as “just released this month”?
When I got my 30XX GPU around when they released, the drivers for it were buggy (on Windows too but especially Ubuntu). Since about 6 months after the cards came out, it’s been fine.
I just built a amd 7600 system in January 2024 and had no issues. Not sure that counts as very new but it was for me!
I wouldn’t classify debian sid as bleeding edge, it is still on plasma 5.27 for example or firefox esr 115.9. I would try it first before saying certain things, or classifying it. There is a middle ground between Archlinux and Debian stable, and sid I think is a great compromise
