@ibuprofen Debian itself is generally a reasonable choice.
Releases are generally around 2 years apart. Which is a bit slow. But it's generally possible to backport leaf packages.
Anything more than that, and you risk breakage.
Ubuntu is a reasonable choice for beginners, because they try to make the install smooth. At least that used to be their reputation. Debian assumes you know what you are doing, so does not babysit the user.
@PrabhjotSingh And how are you doing today? All the pharma stocks crashed today, for no reason. I will never understand the stock market.
Is there any generally agreed upon hierarchy of motherboard manufacturers? Or are they pretty much all the same? My current machine (built 2013) has an ASUS.
I suspect a lot of people would take issue with that. And actually most free software projects, including some very good and popular ones, are single person projects.
@AndrasDeak Poorly maintained means that the maintainer is doing a poor job. Not that he's alone.
but normally an open-source project that underlies much of the world will have some kind of community around it, so it probably doesn't entirely depend on that one random guy
I suspect the comic is not about any specific piece of software but rather about the entire ecosystem of open source software maintained by small numbers of volunteers in their spare time that nonetheless forms part of the critical dependency chain for huge amounts of computing infrastructure
@FaheemMitha Yes. Debian is one of the more likely ones.
I used Slackware for years, then had one install of Debian before I went on to Ubuntu. Not for the install process so much as in general most things work out of the box. I rather spend time on coding, graphics, music, writing and the like then tweaking and hacking the system itself.
As for Ubuntu I have found that by each new release I install I have to tweak more and more of the install to get it to my liking. Hugely why I'm not going to install it next time around. It has gone over a tipping point where the "hack the system" has entered a phase where it seems like more work then it is worth.
I have a few "requirements". As for desktop: 1) Simple classical application-menu. I almost never use a menu, and never use any other fancy replacements or the like. But sometimes it can be nice to see the various things listed by groups. 2) a decent application launcher (Using Rofi and that is nice). 3/4) This one is the hardest and that is a good alt+tab viewer + "all windows / desktop" viewer. 5) Handle multiple monitors well.
As for alt+tab and desktop overview I think GNOME is good. One can easily drag windows between desktops. Use windows-key+tab to switch between application groups, alt+tab to switch between all etc. Problem is that it has some bad bugs that go in wild loops. Simply JS scripts that is poorly written.
I ended up abandoning it for KDE, even though KDE has some bad issues itself - but that is more in the setup apartment and the applications switchers and desktop viewers are not as nice. But at lest it does not crash.
I run BIND, Apache and MySQL. But even setting up BIND was a pain last time as systemd runs all sort of network things, it's own caching nameserver etc.