Linux

For reasons similar to why plain bread doesn't show up in sandwich recommendations.

People asking for distro recommendations usually ask for their desktop.

Debian is great, but it's hardly ever the best choice for a desktop, at least not for the kind of people who ask for distro recommendations.

One of the main historical reasons was the Debian project's puritan approach to open source, meaning the distro was very picky about what it could easily run on. As an example, most network drivers for Realtek nics weren't included out of the box as they contained non-free code, there was no direct way to install Nvidia drivers instead of nouveau, a lot of the hardware didn't work in the installer unless you sideloaded the drivers from a usb stick and so on.

There was a non-free ISO version to get around this, but you needed to know of it to use it, and it wasn't provided anywhere by default. The download page for it was just a barebone directory listing within the mirror. No link or information was provided for it on the main project page.

Starting from version 12 or 13 (don't remember exactly) proprietary drivers have been included in the installation images, which removed the biggest pain point (IMO) for novice users. Apart from that Debian has been one of the easier distros to install, and has things like a considerably better experience when updating to the next major release. It's not really slower to update packages than Ubuntu, as I'd be wary of recommending the non-LTS versions to novice users. They tend to be quite unstable compared to LTS.

Personally I've daily driven Debian for close to five years, on all my devices except the work laptop. That one is running Ubuntu 24.04 as the employer requires either that or Fedora for Linux users.

I'll be honest : because people is ignorant.

They tried Debian once few years ago, it didn't have the exact driver they wanted out of the box, they gave up. They think that's the normal and current experience.

Reality is I use Debian every day on my servers, SBCs, laptop but also my desktop. I've been gaming on it since the first day of the installation and it just worked. Sure I had to follow https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers and basically follow those steps. It took me maybe 15min and 1 reboot but since then NO tinkering, 0, and I'm gaming nearly daily from indie to AAA, from 2D to 3D to VR. As I mentioned in another reply sure I might not have perfectly optimized all my performance but I don't give a shit, I'm just gaming!

Also as I mentioned elsewhere the "cutting edge" is bullshit. You can have a Debian installation, stable, and cherry pick the packages you want. Heck you can even pull from a forge the software you want, built it, run it. That's how "bleeding edge" it can be. Of course you can use VM (with GPU passthrough), distrobox, AppImage, Nix (different from NixOS), etc so they are many many ways to make sure you use the absolute latest without breaking your system.

TL;DR: Debian does not position itself as a gaming distribution. A lot of gamers want to optimize everything for gaming and consequently assume a specialized distribution will do better. Meanwhile people who JUST want to play can definitely do so on Debian.

debian is meant to be stable and ancient, it's for servers

Debian is more like AOSP. It's a starting point. Super bare. More commonly used in servers and such.

I guess its cause when people ask for distro recommendations they're usually new to Linux, thus a more user-friendly distro that's built on-top of Debian like a flavour of Ubuntu or Mint is a better fit than straight Debian

Debian takes work, especially if you have tricky, proprietary hardware that requires firmware support. It comes with that magical "free software only" mentality that makes it harder to adopt and hence why Ubuntu and Mint exist. It's a great minimalist distro

My 2¢:

I think it's gamer discourse bleeding out into other fields. Gamers need the newest libraries and the newest drivers or their stuff might not run as well as it possibly could, because gaming is a relatively young but aggressively growing field with the Linux ecosystem in general. Sure games have always been around, but it's never been the focus.

Now that gamers are switching more frequently, and that the average user is likely to play a game occasionally, it's becoming relatively important that packages be up to date for desktop workloads.

My FP right now:

For desktop use debian sucks. I dont want to wait a year to update my apps. For servers its fine. Arch and Nix are my favorite rn and im looking to convert my home media server into Nix soon.

Debian and RHEL are the foundation for most of the popular distros out there.

Debian used to have quite old software before version 6.0 or so. Ever since then it’s been quite a good daily driver for workstations too.

The reason I don't recommend it by default is that there is no updater across releases.

The official upgrade process is to modify apt sources files and run upgrade, then full-upgrade, etc.

That's fine for me but it makes it hard to recommend to people who may not be as willing to deal with modifying system files and reading some upgrade notes

Because linux distribution recommendations are written by people who have nothing better to do than be hypnotized by the jangling keys of whatever’s new or hot for people who have nothing better to do than be hypnotized by the jangling keys of whatever’s new or hot.

It’s the same reason rhel doesn’t get recommended tbh.

I'll give you an example:

I tried to run an old videogame through plain wine. On ZorinOS it ran out of the box no questions attached. On Debian I had to install wine and go through a few hiccups and issues. An average user shouldn't go crazy when the command like says something incomprehensible 

Because those recommendations are written for new users. A new user will be better served by a distribution which puts user-friendliness at its forefront. If you’re not a newbie you probably don’t need recommendations because you already know what distributions are available out there.

I've been running debian sid on desktop for 4 years, I think. Yes, I don't care if it breaks. I wanted to try debian and didn't want to use old packages at that point. These days I don't really need the latest things. I recently switched to testing - I only needed to replace a few words in a few files in /etc. I didn't even need wiki or anything for that, because testing is almost like sid. If this doesn't break on me majorly, I might not switch and just replace "testing" with "forky". I'm really satisfied with debian.

Others already explained basically everything. I'd like to elaborate and offer a few examples to support them.

• On potential users:

  • The people who look for distros to try are seen as newbies by linux users, and therefore are recommended newbie-friendly distros. Also, debian is conservative: it rarely offers shiny new things, so its desktop use isn't high. There isn't much to be excited about, so there are no hype cycles. The current "shiny new thing" in debian was the recent change in apt's interface (now it formats its output into tables, for example), compare that to "atomic" distros. People often still use apt-get (it is in the guides for some reason) instead of apt so even this news in nothing to them.

  • Furthermore, software development often happens with the latest libraries around. It's often a great help that Arch ships the latest software. Debian doesn't have that. While languages these days have their own package managers, having the latest devtools, editors, etc. to try out is harder to do on debian. Therefore, IT students and software engineers have better time on faster-moving distros. Debian is more for the sysops/sysadmin people ( you can leave it there on auto-update and not care for 2 or more years ). The above further restricts its appeal and userbase.

  • Even further, Debian might be bigger than it seems, as others have pointed it out. Perceived marketshare is often based on desktop use. See EU OS's FOSDEM presentation on how opensuse has a bigger company behind it than ubuntu.

• On "latest drivers":

  • It used be much harder to configure Debian. Recently ( think it was with Bullseye) I installed it on an old machine, and debian didn't install the right wifi drivers by default. I think it also lacked the proper firmware. This changed only with Bookworm. Back in 2008, I also tried it on my pentium 3 I had then. Debian didn't have ath5k at that time, and the ndiswrapper hack was harder to pull off for me than just using mandriva, or later, lubuntu and salix.
  • I heard that these days, people expect linux to fully support their hardware on day1. They also expect it to just run on any new hardware they buy. Also, games often need the latest optimizations in drivers: it might just be the thing that pushes the fps count above 30, 60 or 120. They also that they want the driver bugfixes to come ASAP. Early on during a release cycle of a game, driver updates sometimes give big improvements. While using the latest drivers on debian is possible, and not too hard (Compiling a newer stock kernel is easy, even if it complies slowly. Mesa isn't hard either. Still, these require knowledge of old & basic dev tools, and also new ones.), ubuntu offers new drivers to LTS kernels, they are called HWE. No idea how doable this on debian, I never needed such things.

• On "stability":

  • What people usually don't think about it that there are different kinds of stabilities. Debian offers something like API stability, so that user-provided software on the same version of debian rarely - if ever - breaks. It's not necessarily shipping the most stable software, but it has a guarantee that updates won't break anything. Even a slight change can disqualify being included. This very slow process resulted in the old and famous xscreensaver vs debian drama. The abovementioned stability also applies to other distros, but to a lesser extent, I believe. Mostly due to the 2-year release cycle.

• On "ease of use":

  • Debian doesn't have a user repo like AUR, so it isn't as easy to install 3rd party stuff (I know, makedeb, flatpak, snap, pkgsrc, nix & guix exist), debian is so big that anybody providing packages will do it (to list a few examples: freetube, discord, librewolf, signal, Trinity DE, and there are bleeding edge emacs packages available).
  • Debian has docs, but I often just use arch wiki or the gentoo wiki to figure out stuff. I can only do that because I understand the differences and the similarities. Newbies would have trouble with this. Also, ubuntu automatically configures a few things, like installing something with a systemd service also will enable that service. Debian doesn't do that.

Outside of security patches there probably won't be the latest version of apps available, so the software you use can be out of date and you will have to wiat for new features that have been implemented. Flatpak mostly solves this for gui user-level apps, but it's not set up by default and can require tinkering with permissions to fix some issues.

If you have new hardware it might not work well with the kernel that comes installed, but you can enable backports and get a newer one.

Practically half the linux exo-system is built on top of debian, so you can get a different distro built on debian but with better default experience or custom guis for certain tasks like managing drivers, so people you can save time and not have to dive into terminal commands following how-to guides for various things.

It really depends on the situation. Hardware support is definitely better than it used to be and everything in linux is hackable regardless of distribution if needed, but the reason I haven't switched my main tower from Arch to Debian is that fear of requiring extra work for things like gaming and music production. If you're running the newest and latest hardware you might run into an issue depending on the kernel version being used, etc.,

That being said, I use Debian every day on my thinkpad and love it. I have an interest in migrating away from Ubuntu Server and toward Debian for servers as well. I don't think I've ever heard it "not recommended", just similar caution expressed.

Because Mint exists and is just ”Debian configured for regular humans”.

Anyone that would rather have raw Debian doesn’t need to be told that.

Once I installed Debian on an old eMMC weak netbook for a friend after trying about 6 other distros that all had some problem or another, including Mint and Xubunto. Debian worked flawlessly

I spent most of last year running LMDE6 and while it started off good, things just got more frustrating to troubleshoot and the system felt buggier over time. (Which I know is not how things are supposed to be for "stable" Debian.) Switched to CachyOS a couple months ago and things work so much smoother.

As much as I'd like to recommend Debian, its release cycle really leaves a lot to be desired for pragmatic computer users.

Bugs stick around for years, and with each new release you get new bugs that won't be fixed for years.

It could be better if the ecosystem had more support, but as it stands right now there are just better options for the desktop space.

It's fine for servers because they have the resources to make sure server programs aren't a buggy or featureless mess.