Debian for servers and could also be for desktop, though for desktop Mint seemed okay (still Ubuntu based, just without the focus on snaps and the Cinnamon desktop is nice; this one doesn’t fit the question exactly, but figured I’d mention it anyways cause had a pleasant experience).

Whereas on the RPM side Fedora is pretty good for desktop and something like RockyLinux for your servers (essentially carries on the spirit of the old CentOS).

Then again, I never really needed any of the more fancy modern distros, most of the time I just need good LTS and to run Docker, many might prefer Podman.

I just sidelined Ubuntu 24.04 for Debian stable on new home desktop hardware.

Impressions:

1. Installer a bit rough. Tried both "graphical" and curses modes: Both truncated partition-specific strings from the manufacturer's Windows setup. No contextual help; wiki seemed out-of-date.

2. Good choices for initial packages; good apt speed from default server.

3. Firefox base version is four months old -- but is a ".7", so maybe seven rounds of bug fix backports? Ubuntu FF snap version on old hardware is by contrast a ".0", tracking much more recent upstream. Which mostly seems to get me a lot of annoying confections and semi-weekly demands to restart for the new version -- after each of which I must then manually repopulate GNOME's desktop workspaces.

4. Snap-induced clutter of home dir and filesystem utility output is gone! Loving that part.

They said—Debian

I use Fedora if that's helpful. Well, I've been using Bluefin for the last few months and it's certainly different.

I used to use ubuntu for most everything. This year I'm trying arch a la cachyos. It's actually super nice to not have to wait for hardware support and security patches. Has anything broken? Nope. In fact, things that I would just have to deal with as "teehee isn't linux quirky?" shit is mostly gone. Turns out that it really is as simple as canonical and gnome being the problem.

Debian, openSuSE, Fedora, Rocky, Arch depends what you are using for. One of the first 3 if you're running it on a desktop. Debian if you want the LTS part and the huge amount of packages. Arch if you're feeling more adventurous and don't mind weekly updates. Fedora if you can put up with redhatisms, SuSE otherwise. Rocky if you're running a server and don't want to bother with Debian's config dir OCD or openSuSE's shorter lifecycles.