My user account doesnt have sudo despite being in sudoers.

I don't know what behavior you are seeing.

Install sudo, add the user to the sudo group, and log out and log back in again (okay, technically you could just sg sudo as that user rather than logging him out, but group privileges are assigned at login, and it's probably easier to just log out).

https://wiki.debian.org/sudo

I cant run new commands i have to execute the binary.

Normally running a command does execute a binary. You mean that you have to fully-specify the path to the binary, that it's not in your PATH? Like, you're typing /bin/ls rather than ls?

It's probably easier for people to understand what's going on if you just paste the output you're seeing and indicate what it is that you expected to see.

When installing Debian, if you choose to enable a root account then sudo is not installed by default and your user isn't added to the sudo group. Next time try to opt for not enabling the root account to have a similar experience to other distros. Debian does this doe security reasons but it's annoying for users used to a certain way of doing things. Many distros just disable root account by default so you don't see that issue.

It sounds like you’re seeing a few different issues here and it makes me wonder if there’s some hardware issue that’s causing some of this or if the installation is botched (though it’s be odd for that to hose two different distros.

Last time I looked Debian didn’t include sudo by default, so you’d have to install it first. To add yourself to the sudoers group, log in as root and run usermod -aG sudo mariah (assuming that’s your username). Then reboot (logging out your user should work too, but better be thorough).

Grub sometimes includes a timeout longer than I like and you can edit that in the /etc/default/grub file to something of your liking.

Not sure what you mean about the commands, but maybe it’s an issue with your $PATH.

How does Arch breaks and corrupts an external ssd?

I think reinstalling Debian might be the best solution in this situation.

I can recommend Linux Mint Debian Edition. It smoothes out a lot of the "sharp corners" of Debian and makes it more pleasant to use, IMO.

What's with everyone recommending a different distro instead of trying to help the user in the thread?

For the GRUB delay...hmm. GRUB's pretty early in the boot process. I'm not totally sure what would add delay in Debian. Not a lot of per-distro difference there.

GRUB itself has a delay of a few seconds until it starts automatically booting Linux, time to give someone the option to choose something else. That delay is configurable and might vary on a per-distro basis, but that delay has the GRUB screen visible already. So I don't think it'd give the symptoms you describe.

I'd think that you'd have to be either doing BIOS stuff or something very early in the GRUB startup to be getting a delay before the GRUB screen is visible.

considers

Maybe your BIOS is waiting for the old boot drive to come up -- you said something about an external drive dying -- then timing out and looking through the list of remaining bootable drives and finding GRUB installed there? Maybe try going into BIOS and explicitly selecting the Debian boot drive as being the drive that you want to boot from?

Just asking: how long have you been using Arch and why? What qualities did you like in it?

Going from Arch to Debian is a huge leap. In my personal opinion, Debian is a great distro for servers or really really conservative desktop users, but it gets stale really fast.

Something in between both is ideal for deskop use, like Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, etc.. The half year release schedule keeps everything modern, but stable enough.

You said in another comment, that stability is the most important aspect for you. I recommend you...

Fedora Silverblue

Why?

• Great update schedule (see above)
• Extremely stable. Fedora at it's base (already pretty reliable), immutable base (less bugs, since that's more reproducible and therefore easier to fix), also
• Atomic updates. You either apply a functioning update, or no update at all. If you update on a traditional distro and loose power, it is only applied partially and your system is borked
• You can always rollback with one click if an update isn't working as it should (e.g. screen flickering)
• Seamless updates. They just get installed in the background and when you reboot, the next image is already selected for you. I don't even notice an update and never get annoyed. I shut my PC off anyhow every few days, since booting takes just a few seconds on an NVME.
• Base can be exchanged with one command. If you run Gnome and want to switch to KDE, you rebase with one command, reboot, and everything Gnome related is gone and KDE is installed cleanly! Feels like a reinstall, but your user settings and data are all still there. You can also rebase to something from Project uBlue, which offers custom images, like a SteamDeck-clone, different kernels, Cinnamon desktop, and so on...
• Huge software repository. You (should) never install .rpm s directly to your system, you use containers. Flatpak is great, but Distrobox even more! You can access the AUR too if you want and use those apps just like natively.
• And so on

Seems you get good help here. I am curious, after coming from Arch, why did you take the old af Debian? Currently its not that bad, but it will simply get boring if all the new stuff of like 2 years is missing. Why not Fedora or Opensuse? Psst, Fedora Atomic /Ublue images may also be nice!