You haven’t given any info regarding what you want to try.

If you just want to try something different, Arch Linux is an obvious one. A nice learning experience. However, I’d say rolling release is not as recommended on a machine that you’ll be using less than twice a month, since I hear people say you want to update your stuff no less frequently than once a week on a rolling release OS.

So another idea is NixOS. I think it comes with a stable release option? I haven’t tried it, but it’s another option if you want to install something for the learning experience.

If you want something easy to install but different, consider Fedora or OpenSUSE (either version)

For desktop environments, if you want a learning experience for something potentially fun, try a tiling window manager. Sway is one that I’m trying right now (it’s just i3, but with Wayland). Or for something easy but different, any of the big DE will do, like Gnome. I haven’t tried anything other than KDE or Sway.

Maybe try silverblue to see what the immutability thing is about? If you want to stick with what’s familiar, kinoite will give you KDE. If you’d rather try something different, sericea will give you sway.

I always suggest Void, so 🤷…

https://distrowatch.com/random.php

just how “different from Debian” do you want to go?

• staying mainstream – EndeavourOS or Fedora will give you a similar experience, nothing too scary
• try out one of the immutable options – NixOS, Fedora Silverblue, Guix, VanillaOS
• something a little more trimmed down – Void, Alpine, Slackware
• play with the source – Gentoo
• do a little learning – Linux From Scratch

Arch is Fun

Arch btw: it is much stable that many Linux users think, there are a ton of guide to do/repair things thanks to Arch Wiki, and, last but not least, it has the AUR repository in which you can find basically all software you will ever need; the only malus the AUR repository has is that you have to compile every software you install with it (even if sometimes they are precompiled).

P.S. if you want a “ready-to-go” arch distro, install EndevourOs and set the btrfs file system with timeshift. Here’s a guide.

I just installed NixOS on my laptop. It is very foreign to me coming Debian then Arch. Everyone is saying NixOS is worth it so I am going to give it a solid run. I would suggest NixOS if you have time to learn and Arch if you want more familiarity

FreeBSD. Can’t go wrong with looking at unix if you want something interesting

I usually prefer having any side machines running something more stable than the main one, as I’m always bound to use and mantain them less often.

Good luck finding something more stable than Debian tho. Maybe something like LMDE, that just got a new version out and is looking great, or trying out an immutable distro.

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10/01 Second Morning Update: @[email protected] The machine is spare for now, eventually, I would like to turn it into kind of a modern clone of an HP85/HP87 - Good plotting, Nice BASIC. Perhaps replace BASIC with Python once I am more comfortable with Python.

But then, I -do- have a Steam account.

Fun fact - this machine has a touch screen!

I have a similar machine which I wanted to run Mint on. For whatever reason I couldn’t get the trackpad to work (it worked on the LiveUSB but not the install, whatever). I tried Tumbleweed and it seems pretty good.

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Alpine.

But go nuts. Try different distros. Even ones you think you might dislike.