I use Debian as my main distro. Ive played with stable, testing, and unstable over the past few years. I'm confident Trixie is perfectly fine for stable. It looked fine the last few months I used it in testing.
If old stable didn't impress you, Trixie isn't gonna be any different. The hype is just because a release happened, we don't get those in Debian land very often.
At worst, I'd say it's a neutral change.
Even the scenarios you've outlined are better than the alternative. But the truth is, we won't know until we know. Simple as that.
For what it's worth, I don't think they are a communist utopia either, and I think people get carried away hyping them up. I just don't think arguing about it is a hill worth dying on.
If you move to Linux, you gotta be committed. I didn't learn Linux until I said "fuck it" and forced myself to use it exclusively.
You will run into problems. You'll have some days where you'll spend 10hrs fixing something that no other person on the entire planet has encountered before, only to realize you needed to type in 1 very simple command to fix it.
As much as people hate AI, it can help with Linux troubleshooting. There's also wikis and manpages.
If you switch at all, pick something that won't break. Debian will run on your hardware just fine. You won't have the latest and greatest packages, and as a newbie you DO NOT WANT the latest and greatest.
It will crash if you max out your ram and have 0 swap, in the same way your windows system will crash if you have 0 page file.
In recent years its become really trendy to just not use swap on linux and it pisses me off to no end. Its a horrible configuration all to save like 1% of your diskspace.
edit: Also, most distros out of the box do use significantly less than windows. My debian testing xfce install that I just did here a few days ago uses 700mb on a cold boot.
Even among leftists, the AES countries are a sore subject. Most leftcoms, libcoms, trots, hoxhaists, and maoists are critical of places like the DPRK (if they don't just outright reject them in their entirety.)
You also have to prove you make 2x rent, sometimes 3x rent in order to actually qualify for an apartment (alot of us create fake paystubs for this) :)
We also will have a deposit that is usually 2-3x rent that we are supposed to get back when we move out. However every time this happens the landlords conveniently find damage to the property that didn't exist the day you moved out so you don't ever get that money back (or if you do, you only get 25-50% of it). :)
At the place I just moved out of, there was a roach infestation that the landlords refused to hire a pro to take care of that got entirely out of hand. They are holding my deposit for this. :)
You also aren't allowed to have anyone stay over longer than 3 days if they aren't on the lease without prior approval from the landlord. :)
Edit: Sometimes people have to get renters insurance too. :)
I'm a big big fan of Debian. The installer can be a little intimidating for newbies but I think it's a great all-around "throw it at the wall" kinda Linux distro. Ubuntu is based on it so you'll find similarities between them.
There is a way to "pin" package versions isn't there?
I wonder if that would prevent this kind of thing from uninstalling a package that is in transition. Ofc, it wouldn't get any updates, but I'd take that over just not having the package.
Debians testing branch might be a good shout. Packages stay pretty up-to-date and usually stuff doesn't break. Worst case you can pull a package from unstable when needed.
I think linux distros are a coinflip on if they like your hardware or not, sometimes it feels like they just don't like you individually as a person.
When I use fedora for example, everything that can go wrong does go wrong. It's in theory not any more complicated than debian, but I've never had good luck keeping a fedora system healthy.
With Debian, usually the best troubleshooting tip I can give people is try installing testing instead of stable. Sometimes the kernel in stable is just too damn old for the hardware you want to install on.
I think this is incredibly fair and I am sure he has already seen this post and read it, but nonetheless I will forward it to him.
The only thing I'll say is that point 5...I really don't think anyone else on revolupedia even uses this site? I have an account on there but I have made maybe 2-3 pages on there at most. I'm just not all that good of a writer haha. Any accounts you think are his are 99% probably his. We actually used to make jokes about this in RS because Saul just has so many fucking alt accounts for every single possible website/service. "All of us are Sauls alts!" and other jokes like that.
I hope it didn't sound like I was trying to say that everyone should just get over everything that happened. Rather, I just didn't know what else to do for him. It's not like people haven't told him before to stop coming here. I probably tell him this atleast once a week.
Anyways, I'm sorry for any and all stress you've had to endure because of his behavior and hope that you can enjoy the rest of your day.
I use Debian as my main distro. Ive played with stable, testing, and unstable over the past few years. I'm confident Trixie is perfectly fine for stable. It looked fine the last few months I used it in testing.
If old stable didn't impress you, Trixie isn't gonna be any different. The hype is just because a release happened, we don't get those in Debian land very often.