It’s become clear to many that Red Hat’s recent missteps with CentOS and the availability of RHEL source code indicate that it’s fallen from its respected place as “the open organization.” SUSE seems to be poised to benefit from Red Hat’s errors. We connect the dots.
Debian Stable.
It’s always the answer to "what distro do I want to use when I care about stability and support-ability.
And, unlike CentOS, it can’t be legally taken over by a corporate entity and changed into something entirely different. Debian is owned by Debian.
In my homelab I have Debian VMs originally set up with Debian 6 in 2011 which were upgraded another 6 major releases to now Debian 12 over the years. When I think about Debian I always get a very warm cozy feeling.
Maybe just not for corporate enterprise that wants phone and tech support? unless Debian has an Enterprise vendor? The PLM systems and other enterprise level software are certified on SUSE and RHEL, personally I haven’t seen Debian listed anywhere.
I know at least of Freexian. But also, Ubuntu tends to cover the “Like Debian, but with enterprise support” niche.
As a user I wouldn’t use debian. Server yes, workstation, no.
How come? I’m using it on a laptop now, and on quite a few servers. It does both things pretty well now.
Because it’s not updated often enough. Fedora is stable and up to date. Especially fedora atomic has a huge added value compared to debian.
For some, that’s a benefit
Stable means different things in different contexts.
Debian being stable is like RHEL being stable. You’re not jury talking about “doesn’t crash”, you’re talking about APIS, behaviours, features and such being assured not to change.
That’s not necessarily a good thing for a general purpose desktop, but for an enterprise workstation or server, yes.
So it’s not so much that Debian would replace Fedora, it’s the Debian would replace RHEL or CentOS. For a Fedora equivalent, there’s Ubuntu and the like.
Fair enough, it’s good that there’s choice.