Debian-head here, daily driving it for the last 5 years. I distrohopped a lot before but Debian made me stay, mainly because of its stability and the fact that it’s community driven.
It’s getting harder everyday making your needs fit your ethics, but this is one of the few cases and it makes me feel good with my choices.

I’d say Gnome, since I’m so used to it that I feel it doesn’t get in the way of the things I’m doing.
Because that would be my aim: something that doesn’t interfere with the work I am doing.

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Since less techy people tend to use more the mouse/touchpad anyways, I would pick a hard-to-mess-with desktop environment like Cinnamon or Gnome. With KDE, XFCE and such you can screw panels really easily if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Slap Debian under it and there you go

Welcome to the team.
I hope you brought your bouncing shoes because as soon as you’ll get comfortable, you’ll start hopping a lot

I distro-hopped so many times I got so sick of change that I’ve stuck with Debian for 4 years, the longest ever. It’s a peaceful life.

What happened to elementary OS?

Gnome 4 came out…

When Windows 10 came out, half of the Windows 7 system got borked. Mine was one of them.
The next day I flashed Ubuntu on a USB stick

Yeah, he was already on a weird path but after Covid he went down really hard.
I hope he will seek help and get better

In addition to other people’s comments, flatpaks are usually more up to date than their apt counterpart (expecially those from the debian stable repositories).
I run debian and I deliberately installed some software from flatpak (eg. Ardour and Guitarix) because the deb package is a whole version behind.

THANK YOU FOR ASKING, NO IT’S NOT.

I know the name ‘Linux’ is used to identify a family of OSs, but in reality it is actually only the kernel (the part of the system that allows hardware and software to communicate)

I wish people could stop trying to teach everyone that Linux isn’t the OS

Over my dead body!

I could use flatpak to get the newest version, but could I then get rid of the pre installed old version?

Of course you can and if you decide to go down this route you should take a look at Flatseal that can help you with flatpak permissions and theming.

debian’s default graphics look also prehistoric. Can I change that installing other styles?

Debian installs Desktop Environments without any theming, just plain vanilla DEs and in most cases, expecially with XFCE, they are not that pretty out of the box. You can still theme it to look and work the way you prefer.

with debian you are asked to choose the environment: xfce, mate… how troublesome is to change those after installation?

sudo apt install new-desktop-environment, log out and log back in selecting a different desktop in the display manager: piece of cake

This doesn’t mean that xubuntu has bloatware, but simply much more pre installed packages, right?

Keep in mind that the 0.7gb debian image is the “netinstall”, which pulls software from repository instead of installing it directly. There are also debian “DVD” images that can be up to 4gb as well. And yes, Xubuntu has more bloatware but not as much as you might believe

Never felt it as judgement :)

It has shortcuts that feel a little more natural to me and the ootb theming makes files more easy to navigate.
I know you can also theme nano but I’m lazy

The first things I install on a fresh linux install are always htop (task manager) and micro (nano but better).

I will always prefer my iPod Mini with extra storage, new battery and Rockbox like this guy did, and the reasons are:

• better overall build and audio quality
• way cheaper (70-80$ vs 249$)
• better software support (Rockbox is FOSS and has been going on for ages and it’s not gonna stop)
• it actually upcycles old hardware instead of buying new devices and creating more e-waste
• nostalgia value +100 points

All of them: communities are so used to blow their own horn that every Distro becomes overrated in the public debate.
Each single distro is “fine” at best.
Except for Debian.
Debian is Great, Debian is Love.

I spent the last 10 mins reading all the comments and I think we managed to shit on all the distros available.
That’s the Linux community I love, good job people <3