Debian
While this distro is
still considered to be the best offering for rolling out servers, Debian has
also made inroads into the desktop. It now ships with all the popular desktop
environments such as Gnome, KDE, Mate, XFCE, etc. The recent releases have also
introduced a simpler installer.
Debian is flexible and
can be configured as a desktop, or as a web/mail/file server. One of the
biggest contributions Debian made to the free software world was the dpkg
manager, which is the underlying system on several popular distros like Ubuntu
and Mint.
It ships with no
proprietary drivers or codecs, but being one of the oldest and most popular
Linux distros has its advantages. Almost every software vendor provides
pre-packaged binaries for Debian, so installing stuff is a breeze.
The project subscribes
to the "release when ready" philosophy but aims to release a new
distro every two years. Debian produces three distros: Stable, Testing and
Unstable. The latter two are aimed at experienced users and developers.
Unlike most other
distros, Debian ships with older, but thoroughly tested stable packages. This
means that the distro doesn't feature cutting-edge software or technologies.
Experienced users hoping to work with the latest offerings can switch to Debian
Testing or Unstable.
All new packages are
first introduced in Unstable and moved into Testing eventually. At this stage,
the packages are still not ready for mainstream use but have undergone some
testing and received bug fixes.
Verdict: Debian delivers a perfectly stable system suitable for servers.
However, with its focus on older software, it is not the best distro for
beginners.
Rating: 7/10
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