Debian OS is an operating system which is aimed and designed to work in a very smooth and fast way. The developer-friendly feature of Debian OS is particularly useful for companies like us as we developers use various programming languages to develop and support various client applications in our day to day life. We use it across organization for various good reasons.
Pros
Runs smooth and fast.
Supports many tools since it being an OSS.
Has got rich software feature and great backend support.
Cons
Having frequent updated versions to its feature set could have been better.
Great OSS operating system with few glitches in their menus here and there.
Very few times, running multiple Debian OS in a VM environment may overheat and lag.
Likelihood to Recommend
Since Debian OS is an open source software distribution, it is feature rich with good integration of pre-loaded tools with the operating system itself. Many more tools required for later supporting tasks can very well be installed with just few commands. Debian OS has great community help and support both from the existing users and the back end supporting technical teams as well. So you will never be left alone if stuck at some point. I don't see any points which take it back.
VU
Verified User
Consultant in Research & Development (5001-10,000 employees)
We use Debian for nearly all of our servers, along with various Ubuntu flavors (a derivative of Debian) for some additional servers and all of our Linux workstations. Debian is such a robust, general-purpose, and well-thought-out OS, that we use it as the base for our file servers, web application servers, database servers, hypervisors, and a whole heap of other purposes, both small and large. It never lets us down, and it's very predictable life-cycle makes it incredibly easy to manage within our business, with no nasty surprises.
Pros
The APT package manager is dead simple to use, and the APT repositories contain pretty much every package you can think of. If there's something missing from the standard repositories, there's a good chance a third-party repository can be added to fill the gap.
Debian OS releases are often considered, "boring". But that's a good thing! The Debian developers do not make changes for change's sake and this means new releases are very predictable and intended to cause as little drama as possible.
Debian is such a widely used and popular Linux distribution, that practically all Linux software vendors officially support it.
The Debian community is huge, especially when you consider Ubuntu is derived from it. If you need help with anything, you'll usually find it has been asked before and already has a resolution.
Cons
Official documentation is lacking in certain areas. Whilst the Debian Administrator's Handbook is actually rather good, the official Debian Wiki is rather old and tired, outdated for many topics, and seemingly difficult to contribute to. In contrast to, say, the Arch Wiki, it's a world apart.
Debian's bug and issue tracker is painful to use! It's a very dated system and I'm sure this must discourage a lot of people off from using it properly. I would love to see this moved to something more streamlined, easier to use, and less foreboding.
Likelihood to Recommend
Debian is very well suited for application servers, web servers, file servers, hypervisors (personally, we use Proxmox for some hypervisors and this is based on Debian), and much more. It can run on various CPU architectures and scales well from large to small. We have Debian DNS servers running on Raspberry Pis, and large application and database servers running on powerful Debian installs in our racks.
If you want an OS that is rock solid, easy to manage, and predictable, Debian might be the OS you're looking for. The official packages are generally far from being bleeding edge versions, but this means that you are using packages that are battle tested and will not break compatibility at any point during its life-cycle. This, to me, is one of Debian's core strengths and a good reason for recommending it to others.
On the flip-side, the lack of up-to-date versions of various packages may be an annoyance if you actually do need to be using the latest version of such a package. If you need to be using more modern versions, you will need to remedy that yourself or look at an alternative distribution. Ubuntu may be worth a look, in this case, being that it is basically Debian with newer packages and some minor differences here and there.
Personally, I would not recommend Debian for a graphical desktop OS. You'll nearly always be better off with one of the Ubuntu flavors for a modern desktop with all the bells and whistles you'd expect with a GUI desktop.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (1-10 employees)
