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Add to SafariWhen comparing Debian GNU/Linux vs Elementary OS, the Slant community recommends Debian GNU/Linux for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux distributions for desktops?” Debian GNU/Linux is ranked 2nd while Elementary OS is ranked 28th. The most important reason people chose Debian GNU/Linux is:
Debian offers stable and testing CD images specifically built for GNOME (the default), KDE Plasma Workspaces, Xfce and LXDE. Less common window managers such as Enlightenment, Openbox, Fluxbox, GNUstep, IceWM, Window Maker and others can also be installed.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Wide choice in desktop environments
Debian offers stable and testing CD images specifically built for GNOME (the default), KDE Plasma Workspaces, Xfce and LXDE. Less common window managers such as Enlightenment, Openbox, Fluxbox, GNUstep, IceWM, Window Maker and others can also be installed.
Pro Standard vanilla Linux desktop
Debian runs standard Gnome, XFCE, KDE - it doesn't use its own special desktop environment or debian specific modifications or customisations, which means that users benefit from the work of the whole Linux community, Debian developers can focus on the distribution itself, and any support for your desktop environment on other distributions should work on Debian as well.
Pro Wide choice of hardware platforms
Debian has the widest choice of hardware platforms, including:
amd64, armel, armhf, i386, ia64, kfreebsd-i386, kfreebsd-amd64, mips, mipsel, powerpc, sparc, s390, s390x, source, multi-arch.
Pro Very stable
Debian has a Stable branch, where packages are thoroughly tested before release. Furthermore Debian is know to be the definition of stable when it comes to production systems.
Pro Install and forget
Once installed you can almost forget about it and start to use your desktop for your daily tasks.
Pro Easy to find help with any problem
Debian is one of the oldest and most popular distros out there. Debian's popularity means that you will always be able to find a solution for your problem just by searching on Google, or if by chance nobody has had the problem you are having it's very easy to ask the community and quickly get a solution.
Pro Comes with over 55.500 packages
Because of its popularity, Debian has a lot of applications available which range from productivity programs to business software, games and development tools. It comes with over 55.500 packages (software that is precompiled and ready to be installed on a local machine) -- all of them for free.
Pro Highly secure system
Known for being consistent in maintaining a highly secure system. Several other popular distros use Debian as a base or core for their own Linux OS, the security being one of the main factors why it's so commonly used.
Pro Rolling or Release based
Every Debian Release can either use a Rolling or Release based model.
Pro Well-working team
The developer works very well so the the code is one of the best written out there.
Pro A lot of ways to install software
You can either use aptitude, apt or apt-build to install software from the Debian package archives.
Pro Great for gaming
As Debian is the base for SteamOS and because Ubuntu is based on it, it's almost certain that all Linux games will run properly and require no hacks like creating symbolic links because of some hardcoded paths.
Pro Big open-source project
The Debian project is one of the biggest open source projects with over 5000 active contributors.
Pro Supports SecureBoot
You don't have to disable SecureBoot if you use it, which is useful for LiveUSB or dualboot setups.
Pro The Debian Social Contract
Guaranteed commitment to adherence to values, principles, priorities, requirements and guidelines by the Debian project.
Pro A real installer
Unlike other distributions that just extract their Live image, Debian offers a real traditional and modular installer to customize the installation.
Pro Strict separation of non-free software
Debian is one of the few distros that let the user choose if he wants a free system or not.
Pro Debconf
Depending how it is configured debconf does the most of the hard work for you and only asks you with configuration /file conflicts.
Pro Widely supported
Almost any software that is available for Linux provides a Debian package.
Pro Many ports
Debian supports almost any Kernel maintained CPU instructions set. It has also a few non Linux Ports.
Pro Apt-build
It is possible to rebuild the entire system and optimize it for your hardware (of course, it is not as detailed as Gentoo's USE flags).
Pro Unique release cycle
The most Linux distros have one or two stages before a release, but Debian has five before a new stable version is released (experimental > unstable > testing > code-freeze/bug hunting > stable).
Pro TUI installer
The Debian installer can still be launched as text/curses-like installer which is more compatible and keyboard-friendly than the graphical version.
Pro Standard archives
Debs are normal ar and tar archives with shell scripting and additional gz, bz, lzma or xz compression.
Pro Live install images for CDs, DVDs and USB thumb drives
Debian releases live install images for CDs, DVDs and USB thumb drives, for the i386 and amd64 architectures, and with a choice of desktop environments. These Debian Live images allow the user to boot from a removable media and run Debian without affecting the contents of their computer.
Pro Wise release model
Debian stable does not update a lot and instead provides stability and well tested softwares. You don't get distracted by every shiny new stuff that comes out, and focus on what matters: productivity and reliability of your system.
Pro Debian Fast Track for stable
Stable gets backported software from here.
Pro Great choice for returning Linux users
If you haven't used Linux for a long time, say 5-10 years, it's a great distro in which you can quickly get in the boat again. You don't have to worry about falling back. Everything is in its place.
Pro Has small amount of today's bugs (e.g. no duplicate web cameras in Skype - likely not Skype's fault)
But has quite a few bugs from 2016-2017, apparently for long term.
Pro UI design consistency
Excellent uniformity between all the stock application and an overall extremely clean design with simple animations.
Pro Lightweight & fast
Runs well on limited-resources hardware, including netbooks or chromebooks.
Pro Built on Ubuntu
Built on Ubuntu LTS with all its qualities and support.
Pro If you like MacOSX the UI/UX is similar
Pro Extremely user-friendly
This distribution promises you a very tailored user experience and it does deliver on that promise. The developers provide you with a custom desktop environment and a set of neat programs. And the whole desktop looks simply gorgeous.
Pro Active Google+ community
There is a place where Elementary users can ask their questions and usually get answers pretty quickly. Not only by the other users, but the devs are pretty active themselves, often engaging in the discussions on the hows, whys, and plans of the OS.
Pro Simplicity, limited configurability
Sane defaults with less confusion for new users.
Pro Consistent development practices
All Elementary apps are written in Vala and hosted on Launchpad, and there are standard APIs such as contractor for applications to interact with one another. This is different from most distros, in which apps are written in a variety of languages. This design decision makes it easy to get started developing for Elementary and to understand how the various pieces fit together.
Pro A dedicated StackExchange site
Elementary OS has a dedicated StackExchange site where users can easily find answers to common questions.
Pro With new tweak tools customisation is not a problem
Now the OS is amazingly customisable
Cons
Con Stable release contains extremely outdated packages
If you want the newest packages, you'll have to do a minimal installation of Debian stable then upgrade to testing or you need to install testing directly.
Con No default support for unfree drivers
Debian does not official support unfree software so if you have a wifi card or anything elese that requires an unfree driver you will need to download the unofficial/non-advertised non-free iso image which contains all unfree driver packages.
Con Ridiculous package splitting
Even though it makes sense to split devel and the actual binary of an application, the splitting has become as mess in debian and its derivates: for example the nvidia driver is splitted into over 40 different packages.
Con Internal quarrels harm the project
Instead of working all together to provide the best Operating System, some maintainers are just ignorant and aggressive to new ideas or new maintainers. That led to many crises and controversy in Debian's history.
Con Systemd is everywhere
Systemd is very hard to debug by itself, and can break in very strange ways (such as not being able to mount a single partition on bootup), but the increasing number of desktops that are relying on specific functionality provided only by systemd (policy kit, dbus, etc) makes the entire system more fragile and harder to debug.
Con Outdated kernel of the live system
Since the LiveCD is based on Debian stable the kernel is old, outdated but stable.
Con Not designed for general desktop usage
By default, Debian Stable is not that great of a distro for general desktop usage, since the packages are very outdated. You'll have to spend a while configuring the system in order to make it work.
Con No choices
Debian basically doesn't give you any choices, even dpkg supports this feature with virtual packages: for example, it is very hard to use a different sound system than ALSA, like OSS4 or to use ALSA with pulse audio emulation, and the same goes for different init systems.
Con Inconsistent init systems
While Linux uses systemd, non-Linux ports use the traditional sysvinit.
Con Hard to learn
Con Breaks if you suspend/resume
Breaks when you resume the activity on the system if you use nvidia cards.
Con Buggy and non-user friendly
You need to know almost as much as Arch and deal with documentation not as good as the Arch wiki in order for Debian to work.
Con No good choices of fresh desktop environments
GNOME is quite outdated and buggy;
KDE is too old, even in Sid it is at 5.14 branch (at Jun 13 2019 Plasma 5.16 is available in many rolling/fresh distros);
XFCE behaves like crooked, visual artifacts at the taskbar and so on;
Cinnamon as far as I know works better in Linux Mint compared to (almost) any other distro;
For other desktop environments (e.g. MATE) can't say - these are too new (as projects) and possibly incomplete, thus might have many bugs.
Con Old software is not useful, but is stable
Certainly for the stable and old stable versions. But the testing version has quite up to date software.
Con UI doesn't let you change anything
Every installation of elementaryOS looks exactly like the same.
Con Old base and applications
The slow release schedule makes the applications outdated. It drags behind Ubuntu LTS (on which it's based) which itself drags behind Ubuntu which is often still quite far behind Arch for example.
Con Outdated or bad default applications
Con Poor Linux community reputation
The devs of elementary OS feel anyone not paying for their Ubuntu respin are not worthy of using it. Which upset a good bit of people. Obviously the core dev team have issues with their community outreach and PR.
Con Quite buggy
Con Very slow development cycle
Elementary does not offer any release date for their stable releases going more with an "it's done when it's done" attitude. Making depending on newer apps a difficulty as well as a poor choice for those that need consistent release schedules for their OS.
Con Not very configurable
Con The desktop doesn't let you to put icons by default
Con Limited and outdated packages
Packages can be very outdated, and many can't be installed from official repos.
Con Doesn't support 32-bit hardwares anymore
One can install pantheon DE from new ubuntu's repo but Elementry OS is not making new ISO's nor is it supporting them. It makes confuzzled to new users.
Con Upper panel requires extra spaces
The upper panel in Elementary OS requires more space. This can be a problem for computers with small monitors.
Con Emacs doesn't work
Emacs crashes due to a partial gnome library update.
Con Heavy animations
It has some animations that don‘t run well on older hardware.
Con Window control button placement may be unintuitive to some
elementary OS has window controls on the left side of the window. It may be less intuitive to users coming from other operating systems that put window controls on the right.
Con No proprietary driver installer
Elementary OS removed the driver installer of Ubuntu.
Con Problems with basic functions
Problems often arise with functions like keyboard layout and touchpad.
Con Boring UI
It can be very boring.
