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!
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Honestly if OP just want 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.
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”.
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”?
Just about any major distro.
Throw a dart and use whatever it lands on. If you don’t have any actual requirements, they’re all pretty okay.
I’ve been on Debian 12 for almost a year. It’s rock solid and its Gnome is on version 43, which is current enough. I’ve been watching reviews of 45 and 46 and I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. I installed Flatpak to get current apps and it works flawlessly. I’m expecting Debian 13 to come out sometime around Summer 2025, which doesn’t feel too far away given my satisfaction with Debian 12.
I dumped ubuntu for debian 12 due to snaps, and i’m very happy so far. I run sway as my window manager. I guess we’ll see how i feel in a year but i honestly can’t think of any software i run that i’m simply fine with it not being the most recent. I’m even using the firefox-esr version that debian ships with and it’s fine.
Linux Mint EDGE
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 treez all will do…
Ubuntu probably. It will never break.
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.
i cant say enough about mint. its handled all the nonsense ive thrown at it and then some.
Pretty much anything stable and mainstream. Think Pop os, Fedora or Linux Mint
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.
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.
+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.Use Debian or whatever your organization will support.
I find it weird that you do not care for DE since it affects your workflow, but anyway. My take is if you need the latest packages go for Arch if you have the time, Manjaro if you do not and finally Debian for rock solid stability.
Manjaro is a terrible recommendation for stability
