Hi. I have been using linux for a number of years now in a work environment and have used Ubuntu in the past on my main home Pc but after all of the security issues in windows 10, i have decided to fully turn to linux as my default OS for home use. what my problem is is I am having trouble choosing between debian and fedora. Here is what i am looking for in a system and hopefully someone here can tell me what particular OS is best for my use. I know at the end of the day it is my decision but it dosent hurt to have some recommendations from linux users that have more experience than myself. with that being said, my specifications for the perfect distro for home use would be:

- Security (most important) (no easy back doors for intruders ive heard debian is extremely safe in this regard)

- Driver support (i have an asus graphics card and m audio sound card i would like the best support for)

- runs VMs very well ( i plan to run a windows vm when i need to use adobe programs and whatnot. )

- emulates windows programs well




also I am unsure of if i do pick debian if i should pick to use debian stable or unstable. if anyone thinks that a distro other than these would be the best match for me (other than mint, ubuntu, or slackware) i would also like to hear why you think it beats out fedora or debian.

Ah, the age old question...well, from my personal experience, Fedora is bleeding edge and although the Red Hat folks say different, it was not suitable as my daily driver. Debian is quite suitable as a daily driver but using stable means slightly older (but thoroughly tested) packages. Unstable is as the name implies. If you want newer packages but better stability, use Debian testing. I never had an issue with testing, but again, it is not as thoroughly tested as stable.

Debian also has thousands of packages available, probably more so than any distro out there.

My .02

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I have no experience with Fedora, but I think people who use it are pretty happy with it. If you support Red Hat/CentOS/etc type Linux distributions for work (servers, typically), then it can be the more obvious choice. But since you're unsure what to pick, I'm guessing that isn't your situation.

I've been using Debian for over a decade, and I'm very happy with it. I've mostly used Debian Stable, but every once in a while I'd have an itch for some feature or software that wasn't yet available in Debian Stable. At those times, I'd install Debian Testing or even Debian Unstable on some or all of my machines (like, there was this one time I really wanted to use a weird combination of aufs and sshfs for my main file server). I always eventually went back to Debian Stable - usually by the Debian Testing branch becoming the Debian Stable branch.

My advice is to start off with Debian Stable, and only dist-upgrade to Testing or Unstable if there's some specific thing you're itching for. This might be some newfangled file system or maybe it's just new features in the latest version of some software you use.

As for VMs, I think anything will be roughly the same, unless your resources are limited. In that case, Debian might be slightly better, because it can be slightly lighter on RAM resources. But if your computers have plenty of RAM, then this difference is not really going to be noticeable. I prefer using the XFCE4 desktop environment because it's a lot zippier than the heavyweight desktop environments (even on pretty fast computers), and generally more "user friendly" than the lighter alternatives (which tend to not be all that much lighter).

With XFCE4, I can configure things that are pretty Windows-like (pre-Windows 8). What can I say? I actually like the taskbar paradigm. I find it efficient for switching between windows. XFCE4 does Windows better than Windows, with two killer features:

1) Support for workspaces. This is very common with Linux desktop environments; it's simply this idea of having different workspaces full of different windows (you can also pin windows to appear on all workspaces, but I never use this feature). This workspace capability is something I always miss on Windows or MacOS. I don't understand why Microsoft and Apple don't just get with the program.

2) Rotated text on vertical taskbar buttons. It's no longer 2005, people - widescreen monitors are the norm. A horizontal taskbar consumes too much screen space. But with Windows, a vertical taskbar means you sacrifice the ability to have text labels on your taskbar buttons. Same thing with most Linux desktop environments also. But XFCE4? XFCE4 simply rotates the text 90 degrees so it fits. I love it. I can have an efficient vertical taskbar, and I can read the taskbar button titles so I can instantly go to the window I want. Again, I don't understand why the others don't just get with the program. This is a superior way of doing things.

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These are 2 of my favorite distros.

Debian is rock solid. However, that also means there's a lot of dated packages. My setup is quite complex to keep things up to date. I have the Neptune repos added to get a more up to date KDE Plasma install. I have backports for a modern LibreOffice and kernel on the machines that need it. I use flatpacks to install the current Gimp since 9.0 will never get Gimp 2.10. Etc. So while it's very stable, if you want up to date, it takes a lot of work.

Fedora is constantly changing. It's usually got the most recent software, but requires you basically upgrading the entire OS every 9 months, or dealing with being out of support if you wait until OS + 1 to release (ie - if using Fedora 27, the day (week, month, something like that) after Fedora 29 is released, it's no longer supported). Also the rate of change I found it to be difficult to keep from having to reinstall regularly. I was able to upgrade successfully usually from release to release + 1, but I've never managed to go through 2 releases without doing a reinstall due to something either going horribly wrong and breaking, or much more often, performance just getting to the point where I couldn't tolerate it any more.

In the end, do you like to reinstall fairly regularly? If so, Fedora is probably going to be easy to use. If you prefer to install and forget it, and just use it, Debian + backports is my preference.

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is not related, it depends on the configuration (on you), not on the OS. debian, ubuntu, fedora, whatever is almost the same.
if your hardware is new probably you won't get driver, but otherwise it is the same again. If you want to be sure you need to specify exactly your hardware - and probably look for linux compatibility related issues on the net.again, it works the same way on all distros, but probably the version is not exactly the same.This is again the same, it does not really depend on the distro, but the emulator itself. And you can install wine [whatever version] if you wish.

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alright thanks everyone. I think im gonna go with debian stable so i have a rock solid system that i wont have to worry if a package is in testing mode or not. ill still leave this thread open for a little bit longer in case any more suggestions come along from others.
also considering the new news of so many developers threating to leave linux steady debian seems like a great idea as of now


side note: would gentoo be a good pick? ive been sort of interested in that as well. every time ive used it it seems nice but i dont know enough about it.

Gentoo, not really. Not that I don't like it but package compile times for most systems are very long. Good learning platform but the install is long. I have used it for several years but grew tired of the maintenance and long build times.

Not trying to steer you away from Gentoo, it's just not my choice for stable and daily driver. Many folks use it as a daily driver but it's all about how much maintenance time and effort you want to put in. As compared to Debian, Debian has very little maintenance time and the install is short: 1 hour maybe as opposed to several...

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https://backports.debian.org/
https://backports.debian.org/Instructions/

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Absolutely agreed. Gentoo IMO was definitely worth installing in the waning days of x86 architecture. A well optimized Gentoo system would run RINGS around a Debian 486-optimized system. It's still going to be faster if you do all the optimizations that you can, but the gains are MUCH smaller nowadays, and even non-optimized still runs quite well with amd64 systems.

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Alright thanks everyone. I decided on the good advice of debian stable with backports.