Ubuntu 18.10 or Debian Testing ?
Pls help, can't decide.

windows xp

@Haxk20
I could do this, but I won't, for the exact same reason I don't remove my public hair with burning lighter-fluid.
Because its a really stupid decision, that will do me way more harm than good.

But seriously, I tried arch and arch-based distros more than once, and came to the conclusion, that I don't really like them.

For what purpouse

@GieltjE
For my college-laptop.
So, mostly surfing and coding.

Either should do fine. Make a decision depending on the effort you'd like to spend on maintenance/installation

@GieltjE Great advice! Maybe check OS support for all IDEs and SDKs that are required for the courses as well.

@Haxk20 some people prefer not having to worry about the system breaking if they mistype something by accident, and using that time on actual productive work.
Besides, what's the point of running Arch, if most people end up running pacman -SyU every time anyway (ie no real difference from any other package manager, because you're recompiling a binary without even checking what changed)

@ op: I'd go with Ubuntu, since it is the most common release platform for dev software and such (some package names may be slightly different sometimes, which can sometimes cause weird bugs that can be hard to figure out and fix, though the underlying platform is basically the same).
Any other difference that I may not be aware of?

Consider Fedora, I used it quite a bit through college. It's updated frequently, reasonably stable, and has great support, also because of its ties to RHEL and CentOS.

Personally prefer Linux Mint. That's what I used before getting Macbook.

ElementaryOS worked good for me, plus it's decently looking

If you have to choose between the two, choose Ubuntu.

Day after day I observe this urge in some ppl to recommend arch increasing. Dude he clearly mentioned either ubuntu 18 or Deb testing, why would you think of arch.

GOD FOR FUCK'S SAKE STOP TALKING ABOUT ARCH. ARCH IS FUCKING KILLING EVERYONE HERE. It's like, if I ask if I should have tea or coffee and someone recommends getting butt fucked by a sandpaper dildo. What's wrong with everyone. Just today I found someone claiming ARCH TO BE THE BEST OS ever that everyone must use. Like WTF!!

@op Ubuntu is pretty good. Even has support for some very rare robotics toolkits, I would originally have recommended windows 7 or 10, but for linux, ubuntu seems best for you. Check out fedora too if you want. You can explore around for a few days. Some other os s like fedora etc are cool too.

I went with Debian as I have an exFAT solid state flash drive and I couldn't get it to work with Ubuntu... Even after installing the drivers, plugging it in caused the keyboard and mouse to stop working (the flash drive didn't work either, not that I could confirm without keyboard/mouse). Other than details like this, Ubuntu seems ok to me (well, kubuntu, as I don't like GNOME and Unity).

Debian always worked out-of-the-box for me.

In the end, it's about personal preference... I don't really care about design/UI if it works, though.

I started with Ubuntu and ended with Debian Stable and later on with Testing. For me it was because of rolling updates philosophy which suited me better than Ubuntu's. But now Ubuntu have rolling updates as well so I think it's more about taste, really.