Personally I haven’t. While Linux is imperfect, choosing the right distro makes the rest of the experience straightforward. And with it’s whole complexity, I find Linux more user friendly than Windows. Even driver issues, broken shadow file ownership and KDE specifics only made me more confident about my choice to use Linux after I solved everything.
I’m not sure about about using an older kernel.
I’ve already mentioned having issues with Flatpak’s redundancy*, but I also imagine sandboxing could potentially have other issues too. Specifically I use Godot 4.6+ with bindings for a compiled language. (I haven’t used it thus far, but Godot can potentially have a pipeline from Blender)
So, maybe something like that might be viable with a different package distribution system. I haven’t looked into it though.
* and this could be another nVidia thing with the size of the driver?
EDIT: Hopefully this isn’t too TL;DR. I got a bit carried away writing this response.
Debian Stable uses an LTS kernel, so while it’s based on an older codebase, it still gets regular security updates. You won’t get the most bleeding-edge performance features, but since you’re using an older Nvidia GPU, not being on the bleeding edge might actually be helpful.
I honestly wouldn’t be too concerned about the space used by Flatpak dependencies, unless you have a really small SSD that you’re trying not to use too much space on. If you use a separate home partition, it’s helpful to set up Flathub as a user repo (add --user to the usual install command) so that the space that gets used is on your home partition and not on root.
As far as sandboxing issues go with your development workflow, I’m not super well-informed on that subject, but I know that Flatseal gives you a fair amount of control over what Flatpak applications can access.
I think if Debian Stable has one big caveat, it’s that it’s not the lightest distro, particularly when you’re running it with a full DE and Flatpak applications.
On machines like my Thinkpad X230t or my HP Elitebook 840 G1, EndeavourOS has been noticeably snappier. However, EOS is basically Arch, and I don’t like running Arch on machines I don’t intend to use regularly, since it tends to break when it hasn’t been updated in a long time.
Space is a concern but not the concern, it’s about download time. It’s a considerable price of admission (worse with updates, though maybe not so anymore with legacy). I actually tried Flatpak at one point for Krita, and that is part of why I switched back to native.
Yeah, I’m more worried about backtracking from my current setup (a bit more than half-a-year out-of-date but still newer kernel than Debian stable EDIT: correction). Particularly snappiness, I expect optimizations are a big part of that (CPU is Ryzen 2700, might be more important for that).
I wasn’t sure how powerful of a machine you had. The Ryzen you have likely slaughters the CPUs in both of the laptops I mentioned; an i5 4300U in the HP, and an i5 3320m in the Thinkpad. I should’ve been more specific about that.
I have Debian 13 running on a desktop i5 4570 box, and it seems to run well, though I have it set up differently than the laptops since it’s a headless machine I mainly access over RDP and SSH. It also has twice the RAM (16GB vs the 8GB in both laptops), an NVME SSD for a boot drive, and XFCE instead of KDE Plasma.
Whatever the case, I feel like if your machine is powerful enough, the performance difference between Debian and more aggressively optimized distros shouldn’t matter too much, BUT, I can see not wanting to use it if you’re adamant about squeezing every last drop of performance from your machine.
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