We're at a point where you can use Sid without worrying about something catastrophic underway, and even a bug or two could be patched up instantly. I think this argument would have been applicable ten years ago when GNU/Linux wasn't quite there yet with desktop adoption. It's a lot better now.

Still, if you're just looking to update as much as you can at least once a week, then expanding your repositories or moving over to a development branch would be ideal. Otherwise, if everything else looks fine, then why fix what isn't broken? That's the whole point of stable releases.

I know this is just going to derail the thread (I'll stop after this post, so make of it what you will), but I was more or less referring to how in the heck they are "popular", when I barely know any GNU/Linux user who has that OS as their daily driver, newbie or experienced. I could understand some exceptions, but the "number one on DistroWatch" thing just seems like a meme.

Also, isn't Systemd now included to some extent (source)?

Nonetheless, I appreciate the efforts of people like Steven Pusser who port and maintain packages not currently supported by Debian upstream.

By switching to Ceres. Way better and no less stable than Beowulf on a good day. Chimaera did give me problems, though. Perhaps the reality is LTS-based systems generally suck and rolling releases are the way to go. I like not having to worry about doing another major system upgrade ever again.

It's just a newbie's first distro that can then be used to level up to something else when it's time. What Ubuntu should've been (at the very least) and not nearly as much of a joke as Pop!_OS or the "popular" MX GNU/Linux.

I stuck with 18.3 for the longest time because I could still boot with Upstart (Systemd couldn't be removed successfully). I moved over to Devuan and "Mintified" it to the point where I don't even look back now.

Don't they use phpBB? By default, you can only "delete" your post if no one else followed up in the thread, and the previous posts which haven't had anyone else contributing are candidates for self-deletion. If you edit your most recent post in a thread (provided no one else replied), there won't be a brief note saying that you edited your post.

Both Chimaera and Ceres get you closer to upstream versions of software, so all the security updates can come directly from them.

I might switch to this soon. NetworkManager "mostly" works, and when it doesn't, it's a literal pain in the you-know-what.

Also, like one of the users above me, I'm using the "unstable" branch, hence dependency issues with Python (I asked about this here). Without Python, Youtube-dl wouldn't work, so what I did to mitigate this was I copied some of Python's binary files from a backup after properly removing all conflicting packages via APT. Jack and stuff like that are pretty much worthless in my book, since ALSA is more lightweight and just works.

Thunderbird is both a blessing (stable, easy-to-use GUI) and a curse (Mozilla). Are there any noteworthy forks of it, just as Firefox itself has been forked left and right over the decades?

Personally, I don't use display managers, so starting the X session via command line is simple enough for me. I remember liking LXDM a lot, and as far as I can recall, it's not at all affected by Systemd.

I'm fine with Pale Moon. It's the only active fork that supports XUL. The developers might be interesting characters and the browser probably does stifle from limited resource power, but considering that I have JavaScript turned off almost always, pages load blazing fast, anyway.

Another Firefox fork that I like is IceCat, which is created by and for freetards. Too bad there isn't an official repository to automatically receive updates through APT. I never bother with the Tor feature, since Tor Browser is there for a reason (to keep things neat and tidy with configuration profiles).

Otter Browser is great, but it hasn't been updated in a while, hasn't it? At least it's closer to what Opera was like, before a Chinese corporation bought it and installed all sorts of backdoors. Even the "VPN" can't be trusted one bit.

For a Chromium fork that I use, Iridium Browser is solid. It's just that the Debian build is outdated. Otherwise, not interested in Googleshit.