I had tried installing several Linux distros on a laptop (with Windows pre-installed by default) that I own, but for some reason not exactly known or debugged, it wouldn't accept distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, Manjaro, Solus, or even my favorite, Debian.
Either the system would freeze during installation, or the distro would crash during use and stop working even after a reboot. After much research, I discovered the problem was related to the LEGACY/UEFI and how Windows was initialized. In short: I simply prepared a USB drive with Devuan installed with LXDE, and voilà, it has been working perfectly ever since (it's been 2 years).
Devuan is a fork of Debian that excludes the well-known Systemd initialization system.
Philosophically, this is the main reason why many users prefer GNU/Linux Devuan, modularity, for example. But in my case, at the time, it was simply "the Linux 🐧 that works on this laptop and is still Debian-based."
Debian is a stable, reliable, simple, and functional distro with low resource consumption. It's amazing.
I can't say for sure whether distros with Systemd had some kind of incompatibility with my laptop's firmware, making it the problem (or part of it) for not working. But it's interesting that Devuan, without Systemd, worked so well. That’s something to consider.
The daily experience for the average user on Devuan is smooth. So, if you want to game on Steam, YouTube, and use VS Code for any project and, more importantly, if you want greater control over your operating system, use Devuan.
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