ElementaryOS is a great system, if you need something that behaves and looks a bit like MacOS. It's based on Ubuntu LTS versions, so should be good for a few years at a time.

So let me ask the usual question: why not Debian?

There really aren't any reasons not to use Elementary OS. Sure it's highly opinionated but that also means that it's super cohesive and has superb user experience.

It has a Live Session so check it out if you like it and then simply install it.

Which FOSS video editor did you find?

Packages are older than debian, older than ubuntu, and it isn't more stable than debian or easier than Ubuntu. I honestly don't see the point to that distro. If you want the look, there are ways to do that with any other distro.

in my personal experience of using it, it doesn't feel very polished in most places + strange bugs like being unable to install certain packages. doesn't have the comforts of a distro like Pop OS or Mint (i.e. automatic timeshift setup on first time boot, checking for missing dependencies for other packages). that's just my personal opinion on it.

its basically ubuntu LTS with probably the best DE

but its base is really old and they take their time to upgrade it. and there is no inplace upgrade method, you have to reinstall every time.

I would suggest pop os instead. I can't remember all the specifics but when I used elementary, they ended up changing a lot of stuff in an upgrade that didn't float my boat.

What I do remember is that there is no system tray and the creators are philosophically very against having one (despite that still being a somewhat common design pattern that apps rely on), theming support got janky with the upgrade, and Nvidia support was not great.

Of course, Nvidia on Linux has a lot of issues all around but at the time I had one of those cards and pop os worked mostly fine despite that. I'm still on pop os due to what I perceived as a bad direction that elementary took back then. That was around 2021 iirc.

On the plus side, pop os is wonderful! It's like Ubuntu minus all the bad parts and plus a lot of good ones. It feels very fast and I don't really recall the last time I felt like I was fighting against it as a distro.

I used it for years and loved it but after a while the reinstall for every upgrade sucked and I ditched it and went to GNOME Fedora. I mean honestly Debian with GNOME is probably good enough but if you really wanted to you could install the pantheon desktop environment

ElementaryOS has nothing to do with Red Hat or Arch. It's Ubuntu LTS with a custom macOS-like desktop environment called Pantheon. Being based on Ubuntu LTS means packages only get updated every two years, so they can be a bit old. Debian has the same problem, tho. If you like macOS, you might want to use it. Otherwise, you might not. Worth noting that Pantheon is available on distros other than ElementaryOS (but not Debian).

I've been an elementary OS user for something like 7 years. And I've been running Linux as my only OS since 1999. Previously I had been running Ubuntu since warty warthog, but switched to elementary when Ubuntu introduced their horrible unity desktop.

elementary is a great Linux distribution, and is a great user experience. The ONLY 2 negatives that I can think of are that it lags other distros because it's based on Ubuntu LTS releases, and it has no upgrade mechanism so you have to wipe and reinstall with each release.

I use it for work, gaming, and all my various side projects and haven't had any issues with any of those. Give it a go and see if it feels right for you.

Last time I used Elementary OS, it was great if you were only using the official apps, with insane degrees of polish, but things like LibreOffice were surprisingly hard to configure the way I wanted. That was a while ago, though.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but don't new major version upgrades of eOS require full re-installations?

Used it a couple of years ago. Stunningly beautiful but buggy as hell. Got frustrated and switched to PopOS. Today I’d use Mint, or just plain Debian.

I am unfamiliar with the current state, my experiences are from a couple of years ago. I had problems with ubuntu-specific installs, ppas and the like, stuff broke easily on upgrades; that's possibly not an issue anymore on account of flatpaks.

my biggest turnoff was that the default apps had their distinct look whereas 3rd party apps looked different. add to this the occasional QT app and the cacophony was too much to bear.

Fedora Pantheon or something. But really, GNOME, KDE, LXQt, Cinnamon, Mate, soom COSMIC are all in a better state.

No reason here, other than the fact that it's not slackware.

I found my final missing FOSS video editor

Which one? I've been looking for a good long term solution.

Best reason I have is that I never remember if it is spelled ElementAry or ElemenTRY, due to the way the word is pronounced in the US.

It's kinda unmaintained, last I heard