I distro hopped for a bit before finally settling in Debian (because Debian was always mentioned as a distro good for servers, or stable machines that are ok with outdated software)
And while I get that Debian does have software that isn’t as up to date, I’ve never felt that the software was that outdated. Before landing on Debian, I always ran into small hiccups that caused me issues as a new Linux user - but when I finally switched over to Debian, everything just worked! Especially now with Debian 13.
So my question is: why does Debian always get dismissed as inferior for everyday drivers, and instead mint, Ubuntu, or even Zorin get recommended? Is there something I am missing, or does it really just come down to people not wanting software that isn’t “cutting edge” release?
Just run unstable, especially on desktop. It is just unstable in name. Debian’s unstable is probably 100x more stable than some other distros stable line.
In the context of Debian, “stable” means it doesn’t change often. Debian stable doesn’t have major version changes within a particular release.
Unstable has major changes all the time, hence the name.
I think testing is a good middle ground. Packages are migrated from unstable to testing after ~10 days of being in unstable, if no major bugs are found.