Ubuntu’s popularity often makes it the default choice for new Linux users. But there are tons of other Linux operating systems that deserve your attention. As such, I’ve highlighted some Ubuntu alternatives so you can choose based on your needs and requirements—because conformity is boring.
Debian is in many ways the “deep end”. A big part of its development philosophy is prioritizing their weirdly rigid definition of Free Software and making it hard to install anything that doesn’t fit that. I’m not saying it’s not a good distro, but IDK if it’s beginner friendly.
The average user needs a web browser and maybe some office apps
The first time I tried Debian was when I was new to Linux, on a laptop with both the Ethernet and Wi-Fi unsupported. On top of which, it had an nVidia GPU. It was hard.
Now I know much more about Linux and checked the Motherboard for Linux support before buying it. Debian works pretty well.
So, it’s beginner friendly as long as someone helps you out with the installation after checking up on all the stuff you will need to run.
In other words, it’s not beginner-friendly
I’ve only recently switched to Debian after a couple decades with Ubuntu (because snaps) and I had a few issues during installation.
The net install failed to configure my wifi so I had to download the DVD/CD install. That worked but then I had to manually nano several config files to fix about 5 broken things for some reason.
I installed it recently on a different system, and went with the Live option (gnome) and it installed 10x easier and smoother than Ubuntu. It installed in about 4 minutes (on a new/fast computer).
So I would say Debian Live is VERY beginner friendly, but the other install methods are all messed up for some reason. Ubuntu’s default option is the Live option so I think that if Debian just kinda hid the other options on their website it would be 100% beginner friendly…
I would reckon your original hardware also played a big part if it worked swimmingly this time around. I’ve installed half a dozen Debian- and Arch-based OSes on 3 different PCs and four different hypervisors at different times, and run a few more live CDs to boot, and my experience is that there is simply some hardware/emulated hardware that Linux in general refuses to play nicely with.
Debian does make it harder if there are no free drivers, but my non-free wifi cards (an intel and a broadcom) don’t play nicely with any of the OSes’ defaults
The two PCs were identical hardware btw, so in my case Live just worked 10x better.
The easiest hack I have encountered is to install netinstall Debian, and then on top of it, again install same Debian, without configuring or touching anything. When Debian is installed for the first time, it writes those cdrom folder files, which Debian detects upon a reinstallation. As weird as this sounds, it works reliably, both on my SSD/HDD laptop and ancient desktop with single HDD.
Last month I dualbooted my old Windows 7 desktop with Debian 12 GNOME, works smoothly until I open 10+ Firefox tabs, a Spotify stream and a video in MPV, as it has 4 GB RAM.
I’m just gonna copy from my other reply to ulterno
the first distro i used is debian when i was getting on linux and im still using it
You’re right, it didn’t use to be beginner friendly. The installer has definitely gotten a lot better, and now they’re offering non-free-firmware in it; that avoids that whole issue…
Nouveau comes packaged. Most people that ditch nouveau do so because it doesn’t give them high performance metrics they expected out of their GPU, or it didn’t support multimonitor, or played poorly with RDP or any other issue which goes outside of my “watch youtube on my laptop” use case. That is, once again, deviating outside of “average user” territory. If you had problems getting any display or DE to work, that’s different, but you may find it sucks less now.
Once again overestimating beginners. Any OS installation is inherently not beginner friendly, and requires helping them, regardless of Debian/Arch/Nix/windows/Big Sierra Lion Yosemite III, Esq. Jr. MD or whatever Apple’s calling it nowadays.
I find Debians defaults during installation very beginner friendly, set and forget type stuff. It won’t use the hardware to full potential, but that’s up to advanced users to decided after they’re comfortable with the training wheels.
🤣