Tried Debian stable, kept not being able to get stuff to work because of the packages always being too old. Not advocating for Ubuntu either, but Debian? For a desktop? GTFO! I'd sooner start using emacs instead of vim.
A somewhat anecdotal comment here, but I've using Debian stable as a daily driver for years, both at work and at home. Haven't had any issues yet.
It's so stable it's almost boring. 😀 However, this is fine since I can focus on getting stuff done instead of messing about with the distro.
I wanted to, and did manage to figure the installer out once, but damn it's user unfriendly... The os seems fine, installer was not. I had some other issues I was hoping would be fixed in Debian that weren't, so unfortunately I did not stick with it
Does debian even exist? I've never seen it... I've used a dozen flavors of "debian" Linux professionally, as well as the headwear related branches and centos... Most recently I've gotten into nixos (I tried a half dozen distros, none of the "Nvidia friendly" distros would work with my graphics card outside safe mode, even after debugging and official docs listing it as compatible with Ubuntu... Five lines in the nix config, will nix again)
All this time, I've seen countless mentions of this mythical debian... at this point I'm pretty sure it's just a meme, like Australia. I get Australia, someone mispronounced Austria and made up this wild story of a land full of deer who hop on two legs and kickbox (hilarious), but I don't get the joke with debian. Is it just supposed to be the mythical Linux that works on any hardware configuration?
I understand that this is a meme, but dismissing one of the best distro family because snaps are included is dumb. It is easy to uninstall snap entirely.
The only serious bummer is that the Firefox deb-package is now fake and only installs the snap version of Firefox. Go get Librewolf, which is basically a hardened Firefox, and use their repository.
It is fun to meme around when it is with people that are familiar with Linux. But some Windows/MacOS users who are interested in Linux might take you seriously. Ubuntu and Ubuntu-like distros are really good in terms of ease of use, support and compatibility. My first recommendation for a new Linux user is Ubuntu or variations thereof.