After years of distro hopping, I had one to many updates which borked some driver & realized what I’m really looking for is my laptop should be boring stable appliance. Incredibly happy with it so far.
Debian since sarge (server), welcome!
30 years and running for me. There’s some features that might be fun to have but I won’t trade being able to run exactly what I want and nothing more for them.
And it’s still one of the biggest and most complete collections of software humankind has seen. Free as in Freedom. With a constitution and a vision. And nothing stops you from adding a container or something if you want something from nix or arch or something.
Yes brother. Stable is not only for horses. The others can get fucked.
LMDE here. Works very well
Right-o, LMDE for my desktop machines, Debian for all my servers. How nature intended it.
Hooray for Debian, the dullest of dull operating systems!
Here’s to Debian: my most-used and also least-thought-about OS. It just works.
We are all dull men on this blessed day.
Debian is the great choice if you need an OS to manage files and run programs.
What else can you even do with a computer besides managing files and running programs?
That said (with tongue in cheek), I went from Ubuntu to Mint and can’t see myself starting all over again. I’m not savvy, I don’t terminal or at least I never have. I’m just a musician that also plays awkwardly with Blender. An absolute computer casual. But Debian does sound lovely.
What else can you even do with a computer besides managing files and running programs?
Arch users: Update OS!
Gentoo users: Compile OS!
*BSD users: Trying to make the OS work!
Windows: reboot and reinstall!
Android: Watch advertisements!
DOS: hm… Well. Yes.
Hey! I’d like to manage files and run programs!
Is the integrated AI any good?
That’s the best part, you ARE the integrated AI
It is OS. It doesn’t have any “integrated AI”.
I just wanted you to know that this got a good chuckle out of me.
And if I want to use my OS to feel cool? If I want to run programs whose new features I mostly don’t per se need but which give me an artificial sense of agency and make me feel less empty? If seeing a wall of updates whose contents I’ll rarely bother to inspect gives the little autism gremlin living in my brain an erection? What then, Debian fanboys?
sed -i '/ trixie /!d; s/trixie/unstable/g' /etc/apt/sources.listTruly that simple!
Note that packages in unstable channel are promoted from testing, so switching to unstable effectively puts you on to something similar to a rolling distro, but more stable ;)
you can always add repositories that push updated software, or side load it as a .deb from a download
you can also compile it from source yourself
Hell yeah
After doing the same, I also want to say how much I underestimated Gnome. It was in a weird state a decade ago but now it’s so nice.
I must say, I did go the KDE route. I haven’t given gnome a shot in awhile ~ I just recall needing so many gnome extensions. Would you say that’s changed?
You only “need” extensions if you want them. GNOME by default is its own thing that’s pretty different from win11 and kde - everything goes through the overview, things like desktop icons and dash to dock break the intended experience.
I hated gnome, I found KDE much more feature rich and for me at least way more user friendly.
I’m using gnome right now on one pc, but i did install Dolphin lol. The default file manager on gnome crashes copying files from the server
It probably depends on what you want or need from a desktop environment. I use Fedora with Gnome and I quite like it. The one thing I didn’t like was that you can’t alt-tab between multiple windows of a single application.
you can’t alt-tab between multiple windows of a single application.
You can. Alt + ~
Oh, I will have to try if it works with a QWERTZ keyboard, that would be great.
You can just rebind the shortcut if you’re not using an english keyboard. It’s under Navigation, “Switch windows of an application”.
Oooooo I’m so close to trying it but I’m a total tech clown. I’m on the spec step to see if I can dual boot. I only looked at Ubuntu and Mint only because they are for beginners. Where does Debian fall in that list? Note: I’m planning on doing this on my brothers PC which only for gaming. Cuz fuck Bill Gates
Mint is super nice. It installs and just runs and Cinnamon is a lovely desktop environment. I’m an absolute casual who has yet to open the terminal.
Is the terminal where you wear knee high socks for access?
I think so, and I just don’t have the legs for that.
Mint isn’t necessarily for beginners, for people who want to get stuff done it’s ideal.
Source: been fiddling with Linux since the '90s. My laptop runs Mint. I use it for stuff.
Go with Mint. It will be better set up out of the box for gaming. Also, don’t dual boot. It will make it more complicated and scarier. Save any important files to a backup location, and rip off the bandaid by completely ditching Windows. You won’t miss it.
There is a Mint Debian Edition that is based on Debian but with the Mint feel. Debian is a bit “lower” on the baseline, meaning more needing to understand Linux. But it’s not Arch or Slackware.
Wait, there’s what now? How have e not known this? I’m gonna go spin it up on my proxmox server now!
Debian is fairly straight forward I think, I’d think maybe a half step behind Ubuntu and mint for being easy and accessible, but mint and Ubuntu both have communities that have a reputation of being extremely friendly to new folks just figuring things out
Just depends on what you need :) like the other reply said, mint debian edition is a great choice built by the mint folks to be very user friendly and with the mint community. Just keep in mind debian gets updates very slowly, so I’d expect mint debian edition to also get slow updates (maybe someone more familiar with it can chime in), which may or may not mater for you. But as a result it has a reputation of being absolutely rock solid (though so does mint. And regular mint is based on ubuntu. All the versions of mint ought to be extremely reliable)
Personally if you like one of Mint’s interfaces (desktop environments) I’d probably just start with regular Mint. There are a lot of good options available though :)
People do often site the slow updates, but to be honest that’s not been an issue because you can just install the newer version.
For example, I needed to update Pipewire for my audio out through HDMI to work properly. No issues so far 🤷
Do you mean like getting packages from the testing repos? I’ve heard of that but don’t know much about it. Though it seems potentially like something best left to somewhat more confident users moreso that folks that just switched
Yep. Debian is probably my next distro, once I for some reason need to reinstall.
I’m definitely not a recreational distro-hopper, though, so I’ll probably be sticking with what I’ve got until something breaks.
There are so many distros out there now. Crazy. I have the luxury of many laptops and some SFF systems. This allows me to try out a bunch of different distros and leave them on there to play with when I have the desire or need to. I’ve also loaded up several VMs to sample distros here and there. Recommend a VM environment for dabbling.
I had one Fedora VM break and refuse to boot as it had fallen behind on updates. It had been a coupla months since I logged into it and the application had been working fine. That irritated me greatly, so I loaded up Debian for that application and moved it over. I don’t expect an OS to lock me out like that even if updates are lagging.
I do use Mint on my prime desktop. It’s perfectly cromulent.
break and refuse to boot as it had fallen behind on updates
Fucking what?
How are you supposed to update it if it won’t boot? I already wasn’t a Fedora fan, but that one’s definitely getting crossed off the list now.
I don’t recollect the exact message, but the error was essentially saying I’d gone past the supported time for that major version. Showed up right after boot screen and won’t boot. It was a month or two beyond their date for sure, but let me boot and update? I think I tried single user/rescue boot and I couldn’t seem to get it updated, but I did manage to save off all the application data. I still have the defunct VM saved to eventually figure it out, but I’m having trouble finding the time. Lesson learned as I’ve moved to Debian for those roles, but I do keep my only other fedora system up to date attentively.
I landed on fedora. Stable with more frequent updates. If I run a server I usually go with Ubuntu because it has a lot of packages installed already so I don’t have dependency issues with whatever I’m installing and I’m too lazy to install a bunch of packages myself.
I came from fedora & was using debian as a home server. When suddenly some update broke my fedora laptop’s USB C dock ~ figured I would give Debian a go & it worked :)
Do you still need to mess with PPAs or has that pretty much disappeared at this point?
I don’t remember ever having to mess with PPA with Debian. That was all Ubuntu crap, unless I’m mistaken, which happens a lot. I mean, you could add a PPA, but I never saw a reason.
Debian often is several releases behind on package versions, mostly because they test the crap out of everything and try to keep it all as compatible as possible.
You often need to venture outside of their repos if you want the latest of something.
The trade off is no surprises, stability is top priority.
I’ve been using Debian for about 25 years. Sure, stable is pretty slow to update, but I don’t know why anyone would use that unless it’s some production server. I’ve never had an issue with outdated packages because testing/unstable is pretty close to any other rolling release.
I run QubesOS but all my QubesOS run Debian cos it just works and the ai agents are very good at using it and debugging its quirks.
