For me if I need to start a random cli vm it's debian-minimal stable. Needs very little maintenance besides apt-get upgrade for a non-gui VM, not much special h

For me if I need to start a random cli vm it's debian-minimal stable. Needs very little maintenance besides apt-get upgrade for a non-gui VM, not much special handling compared to other distros, just enough automatism to not need hand holding. Nowaday my work laptop if also debian + xfce. There are lots of other distros cooler or with better functionnality, and they're super cool for tinkering, learning and testing, but at the end of the day I want to install something that won't bother me and just let me work without caring (and won't have the cardinal sin of breaking whenever you do a significant update that you need for a software and have broken ripples everywhere), and debian does that: it's not "exciting", it's not "edgy", but it just works, and sometimes that's what you need. I've heard freebsd can do that too but I admit it feels a bit daunting from a distance with no experience in it, and I have no idea how it fares on laptop (notably power usage and hardware support).