Definitely not good for new users if were talking desktop.
Maybe not amazing, but good, surely
Only if you have an older computer and dont need any modern drivers and dont care about graphics or music creation or gaming, and dont care that you right have to put a lot of work into getting up and running like you’re used to. But new users usually care about one or more of those things. That’s why the distros that build on Debian exist.
90% of people only ever use a browser on their computer
I think that’s a high number, maybe 90% use a browser 90% of the time. But it’s pretty common to need to use a printer or scanner which many new ones aren’t easy to get Linux drivers for, watch a video that requires audio drivers for your computer, use a video camera and mic for a telehealth visit or school which requires drivers and software. Most of that doesn’t come with Debian or on the default repos. Web browsers do more than just read the web.
I have had debian on my work laptops (3 of them, they where current gen when bought) for 10 years, the only issue I ever had with drivers was a printer driver and the supplier had a .deb on their website.
Not everybody needs specific software and drivers, most people use the integrated microphone and camera of their laptop in their calls and that is about all that matters. Debian is pretty good at supporting the integrated stuff.
Of course some OEMs work better than others, butthe widely available brands, which also correlate with the most users are usually well supported.
Seriously what audio device needs drivers that haven’t existed for decades by now?
Lots. My ASUS laptop from 3 or 4 years ago doesn’t have sound bu default in several distros. It came with Windows originally. Many of the drivers are proprietary, so they aren’t included by default if they exist at all.
The drivers are part of the kernel in linux, that is why you won’t find them, in most cases your kernel either supports the device or not.
Never had such an issue, especially on asus, and I did have a couple asus laptops to maintain
Literally have never had that issue and I sadly consume new electronics on a regular basis. It may be worth seeing what specificially you have, as I’ve never had issues at least getting stereo working.
I’m positive the maintainers would love to know about what hasn’t been plug and play at least for the basics.
I describe Debian as the “raw” linux experience, where you have to do a lot of shell work for specific things to work, like drivers.
For example on Debian you have to follow This Manual for Nvidia drivers whereas on Linux Mint (and iirc this opens immediately after installing the OS) you have Driver Manager, simply click on the install button for the driver you need and you’re good to go.
Or just use MX Linux (based on Debian Stable) and have the same experience with clicking, “install nvidia drivers”, and off you go.
Do you know if it comes pre-installed? First time I’ve heard of that package.
As long as the new user makes the mistake of buying a perfectly matching desktop, it’s fine.
Blasphemy!
Why
Uzumaki Ubunto
Currently running PopOS and thinking about switching to Mint but maybe Debian?
Do you want to live the boring stable life, where you can just build and build and build your personal poop castle on top of that solid OS for years and years? If yes, switch to Debian. You won’t be reinstalling till you get so bored that you get the urge to self-harm (by reinstalling). We can’t afford new hardware anyways, but even if we do, the same install will work on the new system with few tweaks. 😆
The initial setup is a bit more annoying than Pop/Mint/Ubuntu but not too much more. Upgrades are also a bit more annoying but not too much more. There’s good documentation for both of those procedures.
What if my new hardware ends up being RISC V?
IIRC Debian supports RISC V
IIRC the x86_64 binaries won’t work, so you will require a reinstall.
Yes, but that’s always the case when you’re switching architectures. The x86 binaries won’t work on ARM, either.
And that’s where my comment matches what the Avid Amoeba is going with, that Debian will make the hardware usable for so long that RISC V might be mainstream (and maybe even powerful enough compared to current x86_64) by the time I decide to change the system.
RISCV, potato, unprocessed sand…it’s all hardware anyway
I can’t even say the initial setup was more annoying than Mint.
yeah ever since bookworm, they seemed to sort it out…
Wait debían supports poop castles? I finally have a reason to switch from vista!
Keep Vista, get out to join the protest!
Awesome,thanks!
LMDE, best of both worlds
++ Came here to say this.
The ultimate solution is to have 3 notebooks with 3 different distros.
Obviously
Or two notebooks, a desktop, and a server 😆
I just did this as a complete noob. Well, PopOS is still on my gaming rig, but my secondary PC is now Debian.
I expected it to be way more barebones, but it turns out that my experience has been like 90% identical.
Nice. Thanks
I run Mint with Cinnamon on my Desktop PC and Debian with Gnome on a mini PC. I use the latter as a server and disabled the GUI, but Gnome was hard to get used to. I use my PC for casual gaming, browsing, and casual Python development. I am not a Linux power user but pretty familiar with the terminal. Setting up native Python without relying on UV/conda on Debian was a nightmare, but I guess that’s an edge case. I really love Linux Mint, and I also really like Cinnamon.
If you’re used to Windows then maybe give KDE a shot. Similar concepts to Windows (like a taskbar at the bottom of the screen) but extremely customizable. You can install KDE on Debian - on an existing system, the easiest way is to run tasksel and select KDE Plasma.
I disabled the graphical interface as I use the mini PC with Debian as a server and only ssh to it. I used Ubuntu with gnome at work for a couple of years (I could ignore it back then with the Ubuntu theme, which I liked more)
Never tried out KDE, I know it is very popular. But I am super happy with Cinnamon and I don’t see a reason to switch on my main PC. Of course I grew up with Windows, that may explain why I get along with Cinnamon so well…
Yeah, I mean Cinnamon matches what Windows does really quite closely, down to even the default keyboard shortcuts being virtually the same.
KDE doesn’t match it quite as closely, but it’s just power-user heaven…
I disabled the graphical interface as I use the mini PC with Debian as a server and only ssh to it
Oh yeah, that makes sense.
I’m fairly new to Linux and I’ve been using Kubuntu, and so far I really like KDE coming from a lifetime of using Windows.
Python without UV/Conda is always somewhat of a pain on Linux, well, if you need a specific version that is. It comes pre-installed on virtually all distros, because the distros use it themselves to script stuff in the OS. That also means, if you install a different Python version OS-wide, you can break those OS scripts.
Admittedly, it is somewhat of a larger pain on Debian, though, because it will stay behind on older Python versions for longer than most other distros. After the Python 2→3 transition, they also continued to alias
pythontopython2for quite some years (I’m actually not sure, if they alias topython3by now)…
My vote is on CachyOS
its pretty good
Switched tp CachyOS on my desktop a week ago. So far I’m liking it.
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I run Linux mint debian edition. Best of both worlds.
It is the way.
Oooooh
As a longtime Debian user I’m probably pretty biased, but Debian + KDE Plasma is goated
LMDE. Best of both worlds
I’ve been long time Debian fan, I use it on all my servers and my laptop, however on my gaming rig I had PopOS and recently switched to PikaOS which is based on Debian and I’m absolutely loving it
I’ve got two computers. My gaming pc is running CachyOS, and my other computer which is basically for messing around with and watching movies, used to be running Mint, but I just today switched over to Debian with XFCE as the DE and I’m liking it so far. Super bare bones but that’s what I wanted for this computer anyway so it works great for me.
Only linux distro I’ve ever used that completely shit the bed and refused to boot. Why me?
Over the years I have several times fixed broken installs and upgrades on Debian.
That’s captured in the tier list.
To give you a serious answer, the most common cause is slower rollout of support for new hardware. Might be worth trying again if your first attempt was a while ago.
That being said, the default GUI installer does kinda suck. It’s really not for the faint of heart, but I personally install through debootstrap on my main workstation: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting Started/Debian/Debian Trixie Root on ZFS.html
All my personal servers/sbcs run Debian
I do enough DevOps at work, I don’t need my free time to be a job too
The NixOS, it callllssss usssssss
come in they ssssaid, itssss delcarativvvveee they ssssssaid.
Wait i just put an environment variable in conifguration.nix and moved home manager back out of my home folder to a central spot why does sddm take 5 minutes to give me Wayland now?
edit: OMG 6 hours later and I have it working. I have a configuration.nix that i re-grew with my 2025 backup and a configuration.nix.slow that is still broken if i switch it out. SDDM timeouts all over the place
the diff between them give 0 indication why sddm would fail.
I kinda want to go back through line by line and find out what did it, but I kinda also want to sleep, eat and go to work in a few hours :)
There is no GNU/Linux, there’s only Debian
I’ve been using Debian on servers for 20+ years, but ended up using Fedora on my desktop and laptop.
Debian is stable, meaning it doesn’t change often. Packages don’t get major version upgrades during the lifetime of a Debian release. That’s fantastic on servers, but can be annoying on clients since you don’t get the very latest drivers, the newest version of KDE, etc. Linux drivers move pretty quickly, especially for newer hardware.
You can run Debian
testing, which is a more up-to-date development branch, but you need to make sure you pull security updates fromunstableas the security team do not upload totesting. https://github.com/khimaros/debian-hybridIf you’re new to Linux, then also consider Linux Mint Debian Edition.
This is why I use MX, it is Debian based, but always up to date, for instance I have kernel 6.18.6. Firefox is always the latest a few hours after release, and always in .deb, no flatpak. MX has a couple of their utilities that are useful to setup your system too.
Recently tried MX and definitely +1.
The disclaimer is I haven’t tried too many of the shiny new distros to compare to, but compared to RHEL and Manjaro (ugh), Ubuntu, Mint, and a few other ‘traditional’ choices, MX has been crazy easy to setup and use.
The one thing that hasn’t “just worked” is a USB4 dock that kinda’ works like extra PCIe lanes (it’s just how that style of dock works), which of course the OS is going to freak out if a few PCIe devices suddenly disappear when unplugged. It’s not exactly a hot-swappable protocol!
I’d like to know how to get it working flawlessly, but everything else has been great.
I’m literally the opposite. I have been on Red Hat since Halloween and all servers I have ever touched have been Red Hat or a close fork of RHEL. When I decided to go Linux for my daily driver and more self hosting I went Pop!_OS on my laptop, Linux Mint for my wife, and Linux Mint Debian Edition for all my home systems.
Red Hat is for work. Debian is for life.
Corporations refer to this as work-life balance.
I have to use Fedora at work (or Windows 11 or MacOS). All our production systems are CentOS, so the supported client Linux distro is Fedora, as they can reuse a bunch of scripts, Chef recipes, etc.
I liked it enough that I started using it at home. I like using the same OS on both work and personal systems. I share scripts and dotfiles between them.
I realize that’s it’s completely irrational, but I hate the name Pop!_OS, such that it may have kept me from checking it out to-date! I think it’s so stupid. And why does it need the exclamation mark?? But maybe I should look into it…
I actually do not recommend it at the moment. They are working on their new DE (Cosmic) so the current stable release is very old.
They have released a newer version with COSMIC as the default DE
How is cosmic? My Pop system is my main system, so I need to be cautious.
It is pretty polished to be daily driven. However you might miss some more features in settings and such if you’re coming from something like KDE.
Personal anecdote - a year ago I switched my Framework laptop from Ubuntu to Debian, on ZFS, and it’s been smooth sailing. The kernel is surprisingly new.
ZFS is magic if you have enough storage devices.
I was having all sorts of IO issues because a few shitty HDD cables, and the worst of the observed behavior was some hiccups and freezes sometimes. Hundreds of IO errors, and it was barely sometimes maybe having a pause…
After switching a bunch of cables around and re-scrubbing a few times, I’ve now had zero IO errors for months, and zero OS issues.
I’d hate to think how nasty things would’ve gotten and would still be if those hundreds and hundreds of IO errors were stacking up this whole time.
Been uasing ZFS with USB drives since 2019 or so. On Raspberry Pi 4, then on real computers. My laptop is on a single SSD. ZFS is the only reason I figured I have RAM issues two years ago. No errors would show up on a couple of passes of Memtest86+.
I genuinely do not remember how it acts with one or few devices, but I wouldn’t be shocked to hear the magic extends past replacing raid arrangements or other multi-HDD setups.
I just run sid (unstable) on my desktop. Still very rare to get a broken package, and when it happens it gets fixed within hours.
I have never had a problem with debian except for the whole old packages thing
Debian is great. but where is the fun in greatness? the jank is what makes computing enjoyable. wabi sabi or something like that.
(i use arch btw.)
Arch on my workstations, Debian on my servers.
This is the way.
i too have debian on my homelab, and arch on my main rig
Love me some Debian. But I still have to find a proper way to update only some packages to
testingorunstable.Sway is still on 1.10 and has some problems with Godot for example.
Distro hop to some Arch-based one, so you won’t have problem with horribly outdated packages.
i love running Debian on devices i barely use :D
Yes.
i love running Debian on devices i
barely usenever have to touch :DIs how I would put it!
Installed Debian last night hoping to try out the freedombox thing. Haven’t had much time with it but so far I’m very pleased. Runs smooth as silk on an old laptop. It also feels very clean and straightforward.
I might ditch MX for vanilla Debian down the line. (Extra points for them disabling data collection by default and having it as a choice)
There’s a reason why Debian is so popular as a base for other distros. It’s just no-nonsense, does what it’s supposed to do, never expects praise just for doing its damn job.
I switched from Mint to Debian recently and it’s been great so far. I’m still getting used to the idea of no “panel” (tasks bar), but I think I will keep it that way since it looks cleaner. I find it really easy to navigate with just keyboard shortcuts. It does really feel universal.
Only issue that keeps bugging me is that for some reason the sound quality on any Bluetooth device is trash. €100 headset sounds like a €10 one. An issue I didn’t have with Mint, Ubuntu or Windows. I haven’t had time to investigate it yet though, maybe something is missing in the default installation and is just a matter of installing the right package.
I’m still getting used to the idea of no “panel” (tasks bar),
I’m using Debian/Plasma and I have a task bar. Maybe it’s optional or depends on environment?
Now you’re making me think I should get rid of my task bar…
It’s probably just using the call profile for everything.
https://wiki.debian.org/BluetoothUser/a2dp
This is probably what you’d want to start with. Mint and Ubuntu are probably handling the switch automatically.
Thank you for the suggestion, it might be this. I haven’t had a lot of free time lately, but I hope this weekend I can sit down and investigate.
I never actually had to deal with Bluetooth issues on Linux so take this with a grain of salt.
BT audio devices generally support multiple different encodings, for example aptX, but they can always fall back to the most basic and most horrible codec that is universally supported on any BT host device. Sounds like that’s what’s happening. So you might want to look into why your PC isn’t using the better options.
Yes, I thought it might be a code issue. It just seemed weird that with other Debian based distros (ubuntu and mint) I have never had this issue. I hope this weekend I get enough free time to investigate further. Thank you for the tip.
Maybe the necessary codecs just aren’t installed in Debian by default? Mint and Ubuntu are targeted at laptops for general use, so it makes sense they’d bundle all Bluetooth codecs in a default installation to be ready for most users. But Debian makes fewer assumptions like that, and is often used for servers, so perhaps they didn’t want to bloat it with codecs that many installations will never need.
I’m just guessing here, but that makes sense to me.
You could also install any de on top of debian(for example cinnamon if you liked mint or KDE). Even parallel if you like
Or if you don’t want to uninstall and install a bunch of packages there are official flavors of debian https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current-live/amd64/iso-hybrid/
There’s also just LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition)
Yeah, I know, but as I said I kind of like it and I think I can get used to it. It’s not necessarily something wrong with Debian, it’s just that I have been a long time windows user, and then used mint also for a long time, so this is just a habit.
I love Debian. It
- works
