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Ubuntu has been the easy default for things like WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) for my coding on Windows, and a linux VM on my home server. But I don't really like the idea of having a distro that doesn't treat security patching with urgency in the age of AI-fueled exploits. Need a standard distro with decent hardware support, low churn, and fast patching.

People are saying Debian. What are the tradeoffs? (other than faster patching on Debian of course)

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Nothing really. Ubuntu is just a wrapper around Debian. If you are familiar with Ubuntu, it's basically exactly the same.

I am someone who believes ALL Linux distros are basically the same (with outliers like Nix) but on the other hand Ubuntu does use some things like it's own network manager that is not the same as Debian as far as I know. And it has a working remote upgrade functionality which I used just yesterday. On Debian the process is manual and is not recommender to actually do.

> What are the tradeoffs? (other than faster patching on Debian of course)

Older packages, but that's one of the reasons I use it. On the stable branch you will only get security fixes and very rarely updates for critical bugs.

If you need to use newer packages the testing branch is surprisingly stable (it is the base for Ubuntu) but there are a lot of updates.

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