And if you do like to live on the edge, there is Debian Testing, which is a perpetually rolling release.

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You're breathtaking!

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I literally have not used a mouse and keyboard for gaming ever since I got a Steam Controller. I think it really shines in first person and third person games. Twin stick shooters are a bit more tricky, but work ok.

The only thing I struggle with is strategy games. Somehow I find marking units accurately very hard. Which is weird, because that is what it is supposed to be good at...

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Quoting: KristianI am afraid that I have a very very hard time with giving AMD another chance after the "hardware malfunction error" on my Mobility Radeon X1800. Even though that was on Windows. Even though that was 10 years ago.

Don't let this ancient experience discourage you. I have had my share of pain with AMD as well, but that is in the past. AMD is a solid choice nowadays.

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Quoting: GuestTo be fair though, even "professional" software development mistakes happen.

As a professional software developer I can tell you that there is no such thing as professional software development. There is only deadlines, managers, investors, deadlines, workarounds, hacks, deadlines, cut corners... Did I mention deadlines?

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Valve is the best thing that has ever happened to (desktop) Linux. Second only to the creation of Linux itself. All hail Lord Gaben! :)

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They used something called U-Link:

QuoteWe used a software called U-link for PE, and that software is now defunct. Even if we had the original U-link code, we still don't have the configurations and additional code we wrote back in 2013.

If they coded against this platform, then their code would be useless even if they had it. That can easily happen to anyone relying too much on proprietary cloud service.

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Quoting: ScooptaI personally run stable on my server because I don't want to have to worry about it breaking...that being said I run unstable/Sid on my gaming PC and have never had it break so I think I mainly use stable for the peace of mind just in case.

Debian Stable one the server is exactly what you should do. When I said that I run Testing at work I meant on my workstation.

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Quoting: TobiSGDDebian Testing doesn't security updates in a timely manner.

Quoting: 14I have to throw out a (huge) caveat: security updates in Testing are not managed by the actual security team! To me, that says stay away except for offline development or playing around in a VM. It shouldn't be your daily driver or your server.

Do you have information I don't that makes you comfortable recommending Testing?

The primary task of the Debian Security Team is to take care of stable releases that exist outside of the regular rolling life cycle.

QuoteThe security team evaluates security threats, and produces updated packages for our stable and old-stable releases, and release these packages through security.debian.org together with an advisory mail.

The preferred situation is that the regular maintainer of an affected package (who is most familiar with its ins and outs) prepares updated packages or a ready to use patch which, after approval, will be uploaded to security-master. If the regular maintainer can't or won't provide updates (in time), the security team will take the task of creating the updated packages.

Security for testing and unstable is not officially guaranteed, but the team tracks those distributions as well in the security tracker. A number of regular volunteers outside of the team help with triaging issues on the security tracker.

Testing and Unstable still get security updates through the regular the update procedure. If a security issue is discovered, a fix will be uploaded with a high priority that will expedite its migration to Testing.

All updates are uploaded to Unstable first, so it gets all the security updates quicker. But it also gets all the bugs first, some of which would never reach Testing in the first place.

Therefore Testing is good balance between stability and up-to-date packages.

Quoting: TobiSGDExperimental is not a branch of the distro you can install, it is only a bunch of packages that you can install (preferably on a Sid system) if you dare to do so.

Very true. Experimental is just a collection of packages that are not suitable for inclusion in the the main repository. Things that potentially break other things go here. Also things that are out of scope for an upcoming stable release during the freeze period.

Debian 10 is releasing next week, and they are releasing with a stable Linux kernel 4.19 and Mesa 18.3. Therefore Linux kernel 5.0 and Mesa 19.1 are in Experimental right now. They will be uploaded to Unstable shortly after the release of Debian 10, and will continue the regular rolling life cycle.

On my work machine I run Testing as a default, with some packages from Unstable, because I don't want things to break too much when I am at work.

For gaming, I run Unstable with all the latest and greatest software, and Linux kernel and Mesa from Experimental.

You can usually mix the packages relatively safely, because they will fail to install if some dependencies are not met.

For example you can set your default release to be Testing and add the Unstable repository in your sources list.

echo 'APT::Default-Release "testing";' | sudo tee /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99local-default-release
echo "deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ unstable main non-free contrib" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian-unstable.list

The packages will install from Testing by default, but you can switch to Unstable temporarily like this:

sudo aptitude -t unstable install linux-image-5.0.0-trunk-amd64

Stable is mostly for enterprise environments, where you need stability and predictable upgrade dates. This also makes it a good choice for your not so tech savvy family members that you need to provide tech-support to. Hi mom, I love you. :)

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Quoting: Salvatos

Quoting: Mountain ManAt this point, what is the best Ubuntu alternative?

Depends on what you're after. I left Ubuntu after they forced too many UI decisions I didn't like, so Mint was a natural choice for me. Similar look and feel to good old Ubuntu + Gnome.

Debian Testing is also a good choice. It's basically the same system under the hood, so it's not even that much of a change. And Debian Testing is a rolling distribution with packages that are fairly up-to-date. And if you need bleeding edge, there is Debian Unstable. And even Experimental if you are really adventurous. :)

The biggest difference is that Debian is much less opinionated than Ubuntu, Mint, and other derivatives. They don't have the Debian desktop experience, but rather ship upstream packages. So you get vanilla GNOME, vanilla KDE, etc. with minimal branding from Debian.

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