Long live debian! Long live the king!
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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It's a great base for general desktop use as well as server. Been using it on my PC for years now, and aside from a few 3rd party repositories it has everything I need. It just works and continues to work.
best distro ever
debian is the goat if I want something that just works
Time for a discordant voice in this festival of consensus. Installing Debian is like climbing a mountain for anyone who is not an experienced Linux user. If you don't believe that, go try doing it while attempting very hard to imagine that you are a non-techie Windows user. You will not succeed.
Yes, other distros do manage this better. And yes, that is a problem, because, once up and running with the right defaults, Debian is just fine for non-techie users. Debian could quite easily be the FOSS alternative to Windows for ordinary people who care about privacy and freedom but don't have advanced technical skills. Instead they are stuck, de facto, with slightly-compromised alternatives like Ubuntu and Fedora.
So happy birthday to Debian, and congratulations. But I think we should all be more mindful of the bigger picture here: desktop personal computing is in a steep secular decline among everyone except techies and a few other groups of professionals. We need to think better about how to make all of this sustainable. The lowest-hanging fruit is an easy-peasy installation funnel, and Debian is failing at that.
UPDATE: People are misunderstanding the substance of my criticism, which admittedly was not very obvious. For a normie Windows user, the difficulty of getting Linux installed comes before the installer, it's the problem of making a boot medium. Debian's approach is to say "Here's a list of ISO files, bye!". That will not cut it for anyone but experienced Linux users. Some people here are saying "Tough luck to them". I think that's a shame.
UPDATE 2: What do people here hope to achieve by downvoting sincerely expressed opinions? There is no misinformation in my contributions to this thread, it's just my viewpoint, which I took time to express as best I could. Would you really prefer it if everyone had the same opinion, i.e. yours? Would that not make for a boring "discussion"? I don't get it. Personally I never, ever downvote anyone for expressing their opinion sincerely, no matter how much I disagree. I have not downvoted anyone in this discussion, indeed I have upvoted lots of them. I really hoped Lemmy would be more civilized than that Other Place, that it might have more of the FOSS spirit of exchange and tolerance. Disappointing. Have a nice day anyway.
(Pure) Debian is almost never recommended for noobs, I don't understand the discussion. People would usually recommend Mint for Windows users.
Yeah but why is it not recommended for noobs? I was a noob once and I managed on Debian just fine - once past the ordeal of working out how to make the boot stick. That is what I really meant by "hard to install", but everyone took it to mean the installer software, which has been noob-friendly (if ugly) for years now. I should have been clearer about that.
What? I installed Debian last week, and I think it took something like 4 clicks, and setting my username and passwords. I installed it because I couldn't get Ubuntu or OpenSuse to install (guessing because I have a 3090 GPU paired with an old intel 4770k/Z97 chipset).
IMHO it is really hard to talk about installers.
I 100% agree that the Debian installer has a lot of room for improvements, just from the top of my head
- Make default installations much easier
- Collect needed information before installation starts (instead of the a little information, a little installation process at the moment)...
OTOH, and that is the main selling point: The installer is very flexible, if you know what you are doing and my specific needs are therefore easier served with the Debian installer than that of other mainstream distributions.
In the end, I would happily see a username-password-one-click default option for the Debian installer while not taking anything away from the current one. (Just move all the input to the front.)
I'd rather install Arch. It's crazy.
Installing Debian is like climbing a mountain for anyone who is not an experienced Linux user.
Here's a more user-friendly workaround.
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Nice! I started using it just this week. I built a computer to serve as NAS with Debian and ZFS.
I'm also considering moving my Ubuntu based server to Debian; it gets too many package updates that I frankly don't care about, plus even Ubuntu server feels a bit bloated.
I moved from Gentoo to Ubuntu a few years ago precisely to reduce my workload; I just wanted it to work... and now I'm considering Debian for the same reason.
I'm in a similar boat. I've been using Ubuntu on my servers for years but all the crap around snaps and paid sec updates has worn me down. I'm actively in the process of switching it all to Debian.
Snaps seemed like such a time-saver until I tried installing some and they just didn’t work at all, or needed some workarounds and janky weird solutions to even function.
Specifically I’m talking about microk8s. What a god-awful snap, I never got it working and it’s completely broken out of the box. Ugh, I’m eyeballing a move to Debian for my headless servers too.
Something a Gentoo user might care about is the distro's compile time options. Ubuntu uses -O2 and LTO, Debian uses -O1. Debian has always been noticably slower overall for me.
Don't do what I did and go with Tumbleweed. It gets more updates than Arch.
It's not that difficult to build your own kernel based on the official debian one: https://kernel-team.pages.debian.net/kernel-handbook/ch-common-tasks.html#s-common-official
It doesn't make much of a difference in the kernel, but I definitely notice it on Debian's Firefox vs Flatpak.
Debian will run on every server I will ever set up and for good reason!
Here I am regretting my decision to move from CentOS to rocky on my servers
I started with Ubuntu servers and moved on to Debian, never used anything else much because it always worked great but Redhat clones are supposed to be really nice too and I love Fedora on desktop! What's the problem with your Rocky server?
It's just the drama that IBM is causing in the redhat world. It makes me nervous.
Don't worry too much about that, it sucks but won't kill Rocky, Alma or Oracle because Redhat doesn't have the rights to do that, they can just make maintanace of those a lot harder! ;)
I really enjoy Debian. I have no need for bleeding edge software releases, what I need is stability. I even run Firefox ESR 😀 It's quite hard to brick a Debian stable installation (if not doing any extraordinary that is).
Same here. I use Debian on everything for years and it never broke my workflow and I never experienced a breaking update. Since Firefox-ESR also finally works with hardware acceleration OOTB for me, I am very happy.
HAPPY BDAY DEBIAN!!!!
EVEN THO I CANT UAE U I WISH U ALL THE BEST
I've been happily running Debian for over a decade. Stable for servers, Testing or SID for laptops and desktops. The original installs not still running and upgrading are ones on hardware too obsolete to be useful (SheevaPlug). Still probably supported by Debian though!
Including one install that started as Mint Debian Edition, was upgrading to Testing, then cross graded from 32bit to 64bit, been through 3 motherboards and is now Stable for it's final days before the disk is scrapped.
I love the pacakaging, the philosophy and all the platforms supported (including really old ones).
I literally count it among the proof humans are not irredeemable.
Edit: Expand about "obsolete".
How stable is Testing for daily use by the way?
Absolutely fine. Probably helps I'm a XFCE man so at least my desktop doesn't suddenly change. I enjoy the constant incrementing of stuff. Gets boring before a Stable release during the freeze.
Debian is my "Ol Reliable". Love it.
Apt-Get HappyAnniversaryParty
Never felt the need to pick Debian since it has very old packages but it's good with choice.
If you want a rolling release then testing or Sid is where it's at. They are usually ahead of Ubuntu.
stable and new stuff on unstable.
I've been an Ubuntu user for about 20 years. I'm too lazy to distro hop and never tried debian.
How does debian compare to kde Ubuntu (kubuntu)? Is it worth the switch?
Debian <3