Why switch?
I played with the idea of switching for quite a while. Having switched my daily driver from Windows maybe 6-9 Months ago I made many mistakes in the meantime.
Good and bad
This may have led to a diminshed experience with ubuntu but all in all, I was very pleased to see that Linux works as a daily driver. Still, I was unhappy with the kind of dumbed down gnome experience.
Problems
There were errors neither I nor people I asked could fix and the snap situation on ubuntu (just the fact that they’re proprietary, nothing else).
Installation
Installing debian (and kde) was easier and harder than I expected. The download mirror I used must not have been great although its very close to my location because it took ages although my internet connections is good.
Apps
Since I switched to Linux, I toned down my app diet a lot. Installing all my apps from ubuntu was as easy as writing a short list and going through discover. Later I added flatpak which gave me a couple apps not available through discover (such as fluffychat). The last two I copied directly as appimages.
Games
I was scared that the „old kernel“ of stable debian would be a problem. As it turns out, everthing works great so far, a lot better than on ubuntu which might or might not be my fault.
Instability
Kde does have some quirks that irritate me a bit like installing timeshift (because I tried network backups which dont work with it and the native backup solution does not seem to accept my sambashare) led to a window I could only close by rebooting.
Boot time
What does feel a bit odd is the boot process. After my bios splash, it shows „welcome to grub“ and then switches to the debian start menu for 3 seconds or so, then shows some terminal stuff and then starts kde splash and then login. This feels a lot longer than ubuntu did. Its probably easy to change in some config but its also something that should be obvious.
Summary
So far I‘m incredibly happy although I ran into initramfs already probably because of timeshift which I threw out again. I might do a manual backup if nothing else works. My games dont freeze or stutter which is nice. All apps I had on ubuntu now work on debian and no snaps at all.
TL;DR: If you feel adventurous, debian and kde are a pretty awesome mix and rid you of the proprietary ubuntu snap store. It also doesnt tell you that you can get security upgrades if you subscribe to ubuntu pro. Works the same if not better.
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Ubuntu is a great gateway distro. When I dumped Windows back in the Windows 10 days, Ubuntu made it an easy transition, time elapsed and there were things that didn’t work right that I found frustrating. I eventually ended up trying out Fedora and the rest was history. I’m glad you found a good fit for you.
These days, Linux mint should be recommended for people coming from windows. I rate their desktop environment and intuitive style better and faster understandable for people coming from windows compared to ubuntu. If a person always wants the newest stuff recommend OpenSuse Tumbleweed now, since it a is rolling distro but very stable and you don’t have to use Terminal at all, there.
I can see why you would recommend it. For me though, it’s too close to the Windows UX. I try and make people break away from what they know in order to have the cleanest transition.
I just put the taskbar on left side now it looks more like ubuntu. I don’t see anything that makes mint look like windows except the “start menu” position. Its all GTK afterall
If you put it on the top, remove all app icons and add a second bar on the bottom that shows the apps and hides when you open a window in full screen mode, it even gets a macOS feeling out of the box without any addons.
I tried KDE, Gnome, xfce and experimented with tiling window managers. At the end of the day I’m always getting back to cinnamon. It just works for me and I love it 😍
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Exactly this. I actually thought Windows was going to do something radical when they dumped the start menu, but people hate change and so they were forced to bring it back
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It’s funny because I always thought I would go full unixporn and when I finally got to Linux, I was so happy with how it looked, I never got around to looking into things like Sway properly.
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I agree. It was a good gateway for me as well. We will see if debian is the end but so far it looks promising.
One thing I do find odd in my linux experience is that I find myself wanting to track down every last bug in my system (fruitless most likely). It has bothered me in ubuntu and now with debian I also want pretty much no warnings in my syslog if possible. We‘ll see if that works.
The fact that you report bugs you find makes you nothing short of a legend.
Thank you very much. This made me smile. Being kind to others makes you the same btw. :)
Many of my graphic applications spit out warnings on terminal about dbus not responding, because it never runs, neither do logind, but everything works for me. I don’t pay attention!
It used to be at least, but I’m not so sure that it still is. I’ve been using Linux full time for over a decade, mostly Xubuntu but also other distros and vanilla Ubuntu. Last year my wife decided that she wanted to ditch Windows for good so we installed Xubuntu on her pc, her netbook and our new htpc, and I was surprised that we ran into so many different issues. I could solve some of them but I think it would be much more difficult for a first time Linux user, and potentially give them a bad first impression of Linux OS:es.
What kind of issues did you run into if you don’t mind me asking? I jumped ship from Ubuntu just when they started with the snap nonsense, so things I found egregious, like them dropping Unity, aren’t really valid in the grand scheme of things.
Small disclaimer: I’m not claiming all these issues can be said to be 100% Ubuntu’s fault, but if recommending a distro to someone who wants to try Linux for the first time they probably won’t care about anything other than the compound experience. I used Xubuntu for many years and remembered it as very stable and the vast majority of things being easy and working out of the box, which is why I was so surprised that I had to spend hours troubleshooting various things that I never had problems with previously.
Some issues and annoyances I remember off the top of my head:
Unable to wake computer after monitor turning off due to inactivity. Happened to all 3 computers which have very different hardware, which seemed a little strange to me. Did some troubleshooting on my wife’s desktop PC and IIRC it appeared to be the program which would ask for your password crashed, causing the computer to turn off the monitor signal again. Uninstalled the xfce4-screensaver package and disabled password on resume on her PC which fixed it there, but her netbook needs to have password and I think it still sometimes has this issue (she doesn’t use it very often). On the htpc I both uninstalled xfce4-screensaver and disabled all monitor power saving, but recently it has started turning off the monitor signal after inactivity anyway. At least it always wakes up from this state.
However, the htpc sometimes fails to wake up the monitor/tv after hibernate. The computer wakes up but the monitor doesn’t, and the only solution I know is the following procedure: Wake the computer up, press ctrl-alt-f1 to switch to a different vtty, press the keyboard shortcut to hibernate the computer, wake it up again, press ctrl-alt-f6 to switch back to the graphical desktop. For some reason that works…
Every time the htpc wakes up from hibernate there’s a notification saying something about the computer being reconnected to the network. There’s a button on the popup for “don’t notify me about this again” but it makes no difference, the popups keep coming. Can ofc. be disabled entirely from some other settings, but it’s not working as expected.
Watching movies in Kodi doesn’t work. It starts playing it without sound, then it begins to stutter after about 10 seconds and it gets worse until Kodi freezes entirely. Haven’t had time to properly debug it, but it worked just fine on Arch (which I wouldn’t recommend to a beginner for other reasons :)) which the previous htpc had. Instead we use VLC for the time being.
We watch various series on youtube and dropout.tv so we have a browser tab permanently open for each, often with longer episodes paused in the middle. About once per month there’s a popup telling us that we must close the web browser so that snap can update it. The popups don’t time out, and need to be clicked to go away. If you click to ignore it too many times it will forcibly close eventually. Occasionally this causes the web sites to forget what we were watching, and it can take a bit of time to find out where you were in a 3 hour D&D actual play. Probably snaps working as intended but both of us find it annoying.
Over all our Brother laser jet + scanner is great with Linux, but I had to spend a few hours to get all features working on my wife’s PC while it was pretty much plug-n-play on my current install of Fedora KDE.
Wife’s PC had issues with monitors losing their relative position and orientation. It might’ve been triggered when one of the cables glitched a bit, and it doesn’t happen now that they’re screwed in properly, but I think the OS ought to remember the configuration better. It also moved the monitors so they weren’t adjacent, which made the mouse pointer behave very weirdly when moved between then until she rearranged them in the settings.
There were some other things that I’m not able to recall right now too, nothing too serious for someone with Linux experience. My wife used Ubuntu at university so she’s not computer illiterate, but I don’t think she would’ve had the time and energy to spend hours troubleshooting issues, searching online and digging around in config files, so she probably would’ve switched back to Windows since it mostly worked for her.
Bloody hell, that’s a tremendous post. Thanks for taking the time to write it.
I can totally see why anyone would abandon Linux with those problems. But at least now we all know just to send you round if anyone is having problems 😏
Fortunately I dislike Windows so much that I’m willing to spend a few weekends helping someone switch to Linux, especially if it’s my wife :D I’m also realizing I might’ve skipped a step in the conversation since the person I replied to was talking about Ubuntu, and it’s possible that at least some of those problems were specific to Xfce. In my mind I reasoned “I used to think that Xubuntu would be a solid recommendation for a beginner since I had a good experience with it in the past”, and it sounded like others were saying similar things about Ubuntu. Since I discovered that Xubuntu now had a lot of non-trivial issues I had to deal with, I was kind of thinking that it might be the same for vanilla Ubuntu… Or not, it might still be easy to use and a plug-n-play experience for beginners :)
Even if it can’t be proven that some of the problems were stock Ubuntu’s fault, I would still like to blame Ubuntu because they do some really dodgy things. Like the second dock 😒 it seems so trivial, but why wouldn’t they remove the old dock first. Decisions like that tell me other things won’t be right
Devils advocate here, but what makes Ubuntu a great gateway distro nowadays?
When Ubuntu came out it had a graphical installer and UI improvements allowed users to do more without the terminal. I feel like at some point other distros caught up and Unity was the unique selling point. Then canonical became more focused on the server and killed Unity. I am not sure what is the selling point of Ubuntu as a desktop in 2024.
This all comes from my personal experience of Ubuntu being my main distro for 10+ years. But when I started distro hoping I realized there wasn’t much difference between Ubuntu and other distros nowadays.
It still has FAT32 support. I think that’s the last thing.
Things have changed since those days fam. For example, if you install Steam on Ubuntu (snaps) today it’s highly likely to break. If you want a solid Ubuntu recommendation go with the downstreams: Mint, PopOS, etc.
I would argue that no one should install any snaps.
You could try Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) it has timeshift installed in the live iso, useful to restore a system when it’s unbootable. Anyway it doesn’t come with KDE but Cinnamon or XFCE.
For me Debian or LMDE is good for a home server due to not continuous package update, just major security an important ones.
For a Deskop or laptop in my opinion Fedora KDE or Gnome is the best experience.
For me Debian or LMDE is good for a home server due to not continuous package update, just major security an important ones.
You can have a similar experience from a rolling release with debian !
Trixie (testing) or Sid (unstable) or backports !
Backports seems promising because that’s the version of the package going into the next debian release.
Don’t you mean Sid (unstable) ? :)
Edited !
Interesting! I have not tried fedora yet. I really like to be able to get some time off gnome for now though. Is there a particular difference between debian based distros and fedora? I cant really say I know them. The biggest differences I see make the desktop environments. Everything else, like package managers are also flexible.
There is all but no difference if you use a desktop environment. That’s where the variation is.
Thanks for pointing that out. I had a feeling that this would be the conclusion but I‘m still open to learn more.
It also uses the Red Hat RPM package format and a different package manager. But it just amounts to a few different commands to learn if you manage packages on the command line.
Please report back in a few weeks and a few months, and maybe even a year or two down the road.
Generally “I’m really (happy/upset/confused/sad) with it” after only a day isn’t really good feedback for people thinking of changing, but it does provide a good baseline to measure against once you’re more familiar with it, and getting glimpses into your learning curve might be really helpful for people looking for advice on which OS to go with.
I run Debian since 1998 and am happy.
I went from Debian to centos in the 2000s for work, to ubuntu and now all my creations are debian again, I’ve come full circle.
I agree that normally, it isnt. But my post also was about the installation process and the changeover from one distro to the other. They were both very smooth. I was prepared for a lot more issues.
Generally yes, I will report back further down the line.
Unfortunately Debian stable doesn’t ship our bugfix releases after the major Debian version gets tagged - KDE Plasma in Debian is currently at 5.27.5, and 5.27.10 was released upstream two months ago.
In other words, you’ll be experiencing bugs that have long been fixed… I’d advise to stay away from Debian for KDE Plasma because of that. If you want a Debian based distro with a good KDE Plasma experience, KUbuntu is likely a better choice, even with forced snaps. If you don’t need Debian though I’d recommend taking a look at Fedora KDE or Arch (derivatives).
Thanks for the heads up. I do get that faster updates mean a lot to some folks. There is always an argument for more up to date software but one needs to compromise sometimes. Using debian has been great so far and its working better than ubuntu (which might be a configuration issue). I’ll update if stuff starts breaking.
Man, I feel you. Sometimes you just want to get on with your life without babysitting the OS. Debian will stay out of your way and just work. Enjoy it!
Thanks for mentioning it. I‘m glad I‘m not the only one „using Linux“ instead of „living Linux“.
It also doesnt tell you that you can get security upgrades if you subscribe to ubuntu pro
Wow, do Ubuntu not have security updates in the “free” version?
Sorry, I meant „Additional security updates“. its not very useful for normal users and canonical is targeting enterprises with it but looking at it every day without a non hacky way to disable it just wore on me.
They do, including those that are in Debian, but they also have an additional source of faster security updates developed in house, which they hold back from the free path in favor of the pro package.
Personally, I feel a bit torn about this. On the one hand, this should be, officially at least, purely an additional service on top of what’s available in the baseline distro, and isn’t taking anything away from that.
On the other hand, I strongly disagree with holding back security fixes from anyone, ever, for any reason. Also, the claim that it will never take away anything from the free base distro is at least a little bit suspect. I would not be surprised if the existence of the pro path were to gradually erode the quality and timelyness of the base security upgrade path over time. Also, Ubuntu is now very annoying about nagging you to upgrade to pro, and the way to disable that is fairly involved and very much non-official. The whole thing goes against what I expect from a F/OSS operating system. I don’t quite understand why this topic hasn’t been a much bigger issue in Linux circles yet. It certainly doesn’t sit right with me…
Not that I’m a fan of Ubuntu here (I generally don’t run it when I can run anything else), but I do want to say I think you’ve missed the point of the Pro tier.
Ubuntu releases two stable versions a year which are supported for 2 years or so. This is like a slow rolling distribution, and makes the newest software’s available. It receives regular security updates from upstream, from Canonical, and from backports, again for up to about 2 years. Most users install this version.
Ubuntu LTS editions are similar to the above, but receive all the same security updates for 5 years instead of 2. These distributions are generally targeted for Enterprise users who value stability over having the newest software, and for whom upgrading comes with significant time, expense and risk. The 5 year window is customary among other distros, and is largely supported by and throughout the Dev community.
Ubuntu LTS Pro editions extend the LTS support editions for an additional 5 years, meaning a Pro distro enjoys 10 years of security updates from upstream, backports, and from Canonical where needed. Canonical might even open source their fixes back into upstream for other maintainers and distros to use, depending on the situation. However, since Canonical is providing the work, they charge subscription fees to cover their costs for it from their target audience: Enterprises who can’t or REALLY don’t want to upgrade
Why an Enterprise might not want to upgrade has to do with risk and compliance. Corporate IT security is a different world, where every bit of software may need to be reviewed, assessed, tested and signed-off upon. Major software upgrades would need to be recertified to mitigate risk and ensure compliance, which takes significant time and expense to complete in good faith. Not having to do it every 2 or 5 years is money in the bank, especially when the environment doesn’t introduce new requirements very often.
Canonical is meeting a market demand with their Pro tier by allowing these customers to spend a fraction of their recertification costs on a software subscription. It’s overall good for the ecosystem because you have what amounts to corporate sponsors pumping money into keeping older packages maintained for longer. This let’s them keep using the same software distro all the rest of us can use for free.
I’m not shy about calling bullshit on ANY distro that operates in bad faith, and they all get into some BS from time to time. Nevertheless, Canonical are acting in good faith on this, and are merely collecting money for their time and skill to provide maintenance on FOSS packages that might otherwise go unmaintained.
tl;dr: Pro tier is for Enterprise customers who need extra-long term support and are willing to pay for it. Canonical is meeting a market demand so they can remain competitive for use in those environments, which is good for everyone. It’s benign. Keep the pitchforks sharp and the torches dry for another day.
edit: typos
Pro tier is for Enterprise customers who need extra-long term support and are willing to pay for it. Canonical is meeting a market demand so they can remain competitive for use in those environments, which is good for everyone. It’s benign
Then please show me the button (and I mean button, not command-line exclusive settings or config file entries in /etc, and certainly not unofficial trickery like third party repositories that replace Ubuntu advantage packages with an empty decoy) that says “Thank you, I don’t need Ubuntu Pro, please stop nagging me about it”.
Oh, I never said they weren’t absolute prats about invading user space with advertising their bullshit. The Lens fiasco, Snaps, the popup warnings in
aptbreaking scripts, and the lack of UI toggles to easily disable those nag messages are all reasons I run other distros. There’s a big Mint colored button to turn on the Ubuntu experience without the nagging.You have other choices that do no not shove that bullshit in your face. Canonical is gonna canonical. Nobody said you have to play their game.
My point was they are not withholding anything community-based from anyone. They are entitled to charge for their original work, even they are pushy about it. They even abide by the license and distribute it the changes when complete, but they’re not gonna just do it for giggles.
The additional Ubuntu Pro security updates are also open source, which means open source maintainers are free to adopt them for the regular security updates (and some do).
If Canonical didn’t charge for those additional security updates they wouldn’t be able to pay for developing them, which would result in only core packages getting patched again. Also it’s possible to make an account and get them for free on a few devices, so it’s really not so bad. This way of doing things is better than what RedHat is doing with RHEL.
If Canonical restricted maintainer from applying Canonicals patches, I’d change my opinion. For me I don’t need security updates that badly, so I’m fine with Debian, NixOS (or Ubuntu non-Pro).
That would be all absolutely fine and dandy if I could easily just opt out in a way that makes the system stop bothering me about it. But I can’t.
This is disingenuous on OPs part.
All LTS releases get 5 years of updates. Ubuntu pro (which is free for non-commercial users FYI) extends the LTS support window to 10 years, which is 5 years more than any other Linux distribution I know of
Red Hat (and Oracle, Rocky, Alma Linux), SUSE, openSUSE Leap are ten year lifecycles. openSUSE Leap may move to something else though.
It’s still unacceptable to use the operating system, which is supposed to obey the user and nobody else, as a digital billboard.
Who’s making Ubuntu now, Microsoft!?
you hit
apt updateand get an add for Ubuntu pro. Invasive ads in my linux? no thanks.
Thx for the post. Nice reading your experience.
Fluffychat flathub https://flathub.org/apps/im.fluffychat.Fluffychat
Thanks. I failed to mention that I found fluffychat from flathub shortly after through their website. :) but thanks for mentioning it.
Ubuntu is Debian anyway. Why not installing MX (based on Debian too) with XFCE, it is the best experience I have had.
I come from good old LFS from the 90s and for me, a distro is just a kernel with some GNU utils, a window manager, and a way to get packages (which is about the only diff between “distro”)
Makes sense. This is also what I deduced after installing arch in a vm. Its basically just a couple options. It would be awesome to have a distro where you can just mix and match all the things.
It would be awesome to have a distro where you can just mix and match all the things.
You may be interested in Bedrock Linux.
Thanks for mentioning it! I‘ll check it out!
Next step: try Arch Linux
I did that, on a vm though. I learned a ton and would not want to miss the experience.
But arch is absolutely not something I would daily drive even if you paid me for it. It’s like driving a car which you have assembled from parts only. It works but you never know it it will start this morning.
Dude, I daily drive my Arch for a few years and it does not gave me any major issue until today
It’s a myth that Arch is not stable
If you don’t do anything crazy, it will be stable, exactly like any other distro
Sorry but you’re oot. People who switch to linux today are complete noobs compared to you and will do a ton of things you consider crazy.
The other distros will accept this or prevent it but arch wont even boot to the DE if you dont follow the wiki to the letter. I had to reaearch some stuff since I didnt get it from just the wiki and still got repeated freezes although I‘m a sysadmin for many years and have two linux servers (one of them for two years) which make no problems at all.
Arch is a pro distro, feel free to prove otherwise.
I agree that Arch is a pro distro. I do IT tech support, have background with Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Knoppix, and Fedora and installing Arch was hard mode for me. Would I do it again? Hell yeah. Would I recommend it as a second or third install experience? Nope. Too many distros that are beginner to intermediate friendly. That said, I will forever have a fondness for pacman just because I like the name. I am still working out device drivers and a few smaller details a month later. Also, the wiki is written by someone who doesn’t do good technical writing. It assumes too much back end knowledge. I kept having to follow blog or article posts and still had to sandwich those snippets I got together hoping something worked…and again, I have some background knowledge of Linux already. An absolute beginner would be totally lost.
You put this a lot better than I could. Its exactly what my experience was as well.
Glad I am not alone, though I follow unixporn and other communities so was very familiar with the overall sentiments about Arch before diving in. I look forward to when I know a bit more about it. I put it on a laptop I specifically bought to install Linux alongside the existing windows install (LG Gram) so I knew I had nothing to lose and my whole intention was to learn. I would have never installed Arch on a machine I actually need to use at this point. I am lucky that I got as far as I did so quickly. lol.
I’m suggesting it to you, not to a completely noob. You know this caveats and probably will be fine
Anyway, use archinstall script. You don’t have to follow the wiki to the letter anymore.
I get that. But people will take „its a myth that arch is not stable“ out of context. It is absolutely not as stable as any other OS, at least if you use the wiki. I have not known about the script until recently.
Maybe if you don’t touch the AUR, or at least: if you’re really careful with it. But who could resist this tasty, tasty, unstable forbidden fruit of random software?
Yeah… AUR is what Arch community likes the most, but also what makes Arch unstable the most.
I don’t use AUR at all. I’m always on Flatpak…
@BaalInvoker @haui_lemmy
One just has to learn pacman, the package manager, or, better, some tool like yay, wrapping around pacman and offering an easy way to install packages not only from Arch’s repos, but from the AUR too; and to use some diff tools, like meld, to merge changes from new configuration files into those which they are actually using; and, for the rest, to read the ArchWiki; that way, i have had Arch running on my desktop pc since, like, 10 years ago. Only shame: systemd.
I am running an Arch based distro called Garuda, and it’s been perfectly fine for me.
Although I get that arch based distros can work great, they’re not arch, same as ubuntu is not debian.
But I‘m happy that you’re happy.
You are reproducing a myth started from Arch to keep newbs and those with learning disabilities out of the way. The 2nd largest distribution after debian didn’t survive this long if this myth had any truth to it.
I have provided ample reasoning for my conclusions. I find it very disturbing that you call this a myth. Are you saying I didnt experience what I did?
Installed Arch couple of weeks back and was surprised how easy it had become once I overcame the first hurdle of connecting to wifi from command line.
Only thing I’m not happy with is the font rendering in Firefox. Hard to say if it is Arch or Firefox.
Pretty sure its arch as other distros dont have that from my experience.
After my bios splash, it shows „welcome to grub“ and then switches to the debian start menu for 3 seconds or so, then shows some terminal stuff and then starts kde splash and then login.
Yeah, the reason for this is that sometimes Debian doesn’t enable Plymouth splash screens by default, so you just see the text stuff. It actually annoys me a bit.
Not on my computer at the moment, so I can’t remember the exact packages you might need, but if I recall, they should be
plymouth-themesandkde-config-plymouth(so that you can choose the splash screen theme in your system settings). You can also find other themes online, but I forgot the name of that website where all the stuff is. Pling? I think it’s that.Anyway, once you have the themes installed, you need to sudo edit
/etc/default/gruband append"quiet splash"(with the quotes) toGRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=(“quiet” might already be there).You can also change the value of
GRUB_TIMEOUT=in that file to whatever your preference might be for the duration of grub’s boot menu, but there might be other things you need to adjust in order to hide it completely and still be able to access it if necessary.After that, run
sudo update-grubso that it’s using the new config and choose whichever theme you want in the system settings.Alternatively,
grub-customizeris a GUI app that you can install to do all of the above (which will also update grub when you save your changes). Just don’t touch anything that’s not relevant. Stick to just the duration of the grub boot menu and add thesplashparameter. Ignore boot priority, etc.It should feel less “slow” to start up once all that’s sorted.
I did this recently but for gnome. There are some cool custom splashes at gnome look - maybe there is something similar for KDE too.
gnome-look is just one of pling’s many rebranded mirrors. KDE does also have one, but you might as well just use pling directly.
Didn’t know about pling. Thanks :)
Yeah, the reason for this is that sometimes Debian doesn’t enable Plymouth splash screens by default, so you just see the text stuff. It actually annoys me a bit.
I always go through and turn off all the stuff that’s covering up the diagnostic information that I want to see, myself.
I have been happy with Pop!_OS but the idea of LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) is very tempting.
I have not tried pop os yet. Whats the selling point again?
The biggest is the baked in support for nVidia GPUs, but their DE has a lot of work done to it for usability purposes. No real advances have been made over the past few years to really set it apart again, but there is a massive overhaul coming that will make it one of a kind again.
Sounds promising. I‘ll keep an eye out. Thanks for explaining.
Keep an eye out for Cosmic Desktop release news.
To clarify, Cosmic desktop is not the default. It’s very much a WIP. Pop OS uses Gnome by default. They add some nice customizations to it too like tiling support and some enhanced power management options.
Pop OS is Ubuntu based, but they replace Snap with Flatpak, package a kernel as close to mainline as possible, and include Nvidia drivers (if you grab the Nvidia installer ISO).
I used Pop for a few years, loved it. Last I used it they still defaulted to Xorg instead of Wayland and that was a no go for me with an eGPU so I switched to Opensuse.
LMDE is really great. Just migrated an old 2013 iMac to it today. Everything works out of the box. Everything easy like you can expect from Mint and stable like on Debian. Difficult not to love.
The only thing you have to like is Cinnamon.
(begging forgiveness, I haven’t read the comments yet).
Regarding backups - I started with using Ubuntu and its Backup application. This application is a front end for a command line package called Duplicity. One of the things that annoyed me about the backup app was that I couldn’t work out how to reschedule the scheduled backup.
Taking control of my own backup setup was the answer. Learn about bash scripting so you can create a short bit of code to handle your backups. Read up a little on duplicity, read up a little on mounting remote file shares, read up a little on setting up an ssh key for encrypting your backup.
This may be an heretical thing to say but I found ChatGPT quite useful in answering these questions (as always with anything you get from an LLM, double check it’s answers against reliable sources).
Thanks for mentioning this. I‘m actually scripting quite a couple of things in bash and some in python already. I had the exact same idea.
But one reason I wrote the post was because I wanted to share my experience with debian (and ubuntu) for users that are less experienced than I am.
I even have a custom made backup script for the 50 services I run on my two ubuntu servers. It is even self cleaning.
Also tried chatgpt but so far I didnt have any luck. The code it spat out (was for screen brightness control) didnt work. But I did get it to work in the end.
KDE is the default DE for Debian these days?
No, gnome is. But debian in opposition to ubuntu gives you a choice at install. You can use gnome, kde, cinnamon and a couple others which I forgot.
debian in opposition to ubuntu gives you a choice at install
That’s nice.
Indeed. It feels very mature and no nonsense like, all over. The only thing that bothers me a bit are some „qol things“ like being able to switch mirrors if you made a bad choice or to easily choose german keyboard while leaving the OS in english for easier troubleshooting online.
So the pattern here seems to be „debian shows that it is community made and you can help make it better in opposition to ubuntu which is commercial and your participation helps both the community and the company“
Is it gnome 3 (shell)?
I have no idea. Sorry.
After a bit of searching I think people generally mean gnome 3 when they say gnome and gnome 2 is now known as Mate.
Ah! Got it! Thanks.
I get that you have the choice at install on debian which is nice, but the flavors and choices of Ubuntu (eg kubuntu ) are super readily available when making your install media. And I unless you are making it a game time decision as you go through the installer, which I doubt most people are, this seems like an incredibly trivial distinction.
Thats viewing it only from one angle. People who are not totally familiar with what desktop environments are might not even consider kubuntu, lubuntu or xubuntu since they are viewed as seperate OSes by some.
Having this menu is very easy to implement but the possibilities are great.
Fair point
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I respect that this is your experience and opinion. In my opinion you can just read up a bit and most importantly try them out.
As someone pointed out to me recently, most unexperienced users just view the DE as the OS since thats what they see and interact with.
So while there could be more info about those DEs, the choice is great.
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More mythology, ubuntu is just a layer of fluff over debian. Ubuntu wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for debian. Just check your repositories. It is a fake distribution without character, mixing Free and non-free software from anywhere they can find them and promotes installing “foreign” pkgs to the system just to show they provide a wider variety.
Although I‘m not the biggest fan of ubuntu, I dont think the hate of linux distros is necessary.
If you could tell the difference between hate and criticism you wouldn’t wonder.
A fan? I wasn’t a fan of debian 7, I just thought 8 was garbage and left when 7 could no longer upgrade.
Nice to make it personal. Good bye.
Yeah the boot process is a mess! Debian’s noisy GRUB and unsightly boot text is an obvious and unnecessary paint point for a desktop user but very desirable for server installations. You do have some options though!
Carlo Contavalli apparently has a relatively simple work-around discussed at https://rabexc.org/posts/grub-shush. What I’ve done in the past is rebuilding Ubuntu’s source deb package for GRUB against my Debian system. You can grab it at https://packages.ubuntu.com/source/lunar/grub2. Build instructions can be found here https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/117503/how-to-compile-a-debian-package-from-source.
The great thing about Debian, Linux, and FLOSS is that you can even automate downloading Debian’s source package when it gets updated, applying the silent patch, applying Ubuntu’s compilation options, compiling the deb, and installing the deb! But yeah why can some package maintainer not provide such as an option in the repository! It’s really an annoyance for many and almost makes me feel like I’m not the type of user the Debian community desires. Like, “Wait… what? You like pretty stuff? GTFO!” Maybe its even true? Hopefully you will enjoy using Debian! Its most preferable to Ubuntu in many ways these days!
Very interesting! Will save this. Thanks for mentioning it.
I think there are a lot of unsociable people in the linux community. I should know, I‘m autistic and also pathologically unsociable but even I am shocked at the amount of elitism and RTFMing that happens on a daily basis.
The difference I think is my self image is pretty ok and I dont need to be the greatest and most knowledgeable linux pro on the planet. Thats probably the only thing some folks have to their name.
But I digress. Have a great day.
I tried installing Debian recently as well but didn’t get too far into it. I was annoyed at the base configuration* though. I wasn’t able to use sudo, so I went to add myself to the sudo group and it told me the command didn’t exist… I looked it up and realised that
/usr/sbin* wasn’t on terminal path. Extremely fixable but something I never ran into on other distros, made me nervous how many other tweaks I may have to do.I was simultaneously testing Lubuntu and ended up sticking with that after following install instructions for another app kept complaining about bookworm errors. Perhaps the Debian version was too new?..
* Edited a couple of details to make them more accurate.
I suppose it depends on a lot of things. Errors are pretty common once you start installing a lot of apps in any distro imo. Especially unstable and sid are more up to date but as the name suggests less stable.
As far as I know I was on the stable version. I downloaded the one right on their front page, which was 12.4.0 net install.
Thats stable atm. No clue what it was back then. It took me a bit to add myself to the sudo group since sudo visudo doesn’t work. No idea what the use of that is.
you obviously can’t use
sudo visudoif you’re not already in the sudoers file LOL - is the same security, which you also desire, as having a spare set of keys in the bowl at the entrance to your house, where, however, no one comes unless they already have a key to open the doorI made a mistake, fine. Visudo doesnt work either from my recent experience. At the very least, it should say „dont use sudo as root“ instead of „the command doesnt exist“.
You could have explained it without the elitist touch. Tyvm
I added my user to the sudo group and rebooted (as relogging doesnt work either).
So, debian is cool but you can definitely see how fanboiism keeps it from being great.
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I have no idea what you‘re talking about. I didnt point out anything and surely didnt need a slap on the wrist. Whatever bdsm fantasy you‘re having atm.
I was nice enough to admit my mistake, whereas you were a jerk enough to make fun about it you sad person. Now go away.
beside op’s bashrc fud, it’s a common newbie misconception that testing and sid are not stable like some kind of exotic experimentation would make them so. It is more a stabilization process in respect to the project’s policy/processes and you will definitely find /usr/bin in pathh in either testing and sid rofl
I looked it up and realised that /usr/bin wasn’t on the bashrc path.
lol, no. PEBKAC
Well, I don’t know what to tell you when I had just installed and the system tells me the command does not exist, so I look up the error and adding the path to bashrc fixed the issue. The only PATH export in that bashrc file is the one I added after searching the issue.
It was probably
/usr/sbinyou’re thinking of rather than/usr/bin. IIRC – don’t quote me on this – Red Hat puts it in non-root user paths by default, and Debian doesn’t.You’re correct. That’s one of the few useful things superbirra mentioned, and I’ve updated the parent comment to correct my initial error. I was recalling from memory and just remembered it was a “bin” folder.
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You don’t need to be defensive about this. I’m just sharing my experience, I’m not trying to insult Debian or it’s maintainers. And yes I believe anything can happen considering the crazy bugs I have seen get shipped. Windows wiping One Drive files, multiple Steam bugs on Linux that can wipe your system, etc. Or it may be my choices during install, but it is still unusual compared to all of my Ubuntu installs.
Anyway, I took another shot at it and it still happened. I downloaded the 12.4.0 net install that is on the front page of debian.org. Installed two different times in Virtualbox, once using the graphical and once using the CLI install, using two different mirrors. I unchecked Gnome and ticked LXDE during installation (as I did before), because that is the DE I wanted. I would hope that would not change bashrc settings. Tried sudoing and got the exact same error.
Here’s the generated .bashrc which I have not touched.
.bashrc
# ~/.bashrc: executed by bash(1) for non-login shells. # see /usr/share/doc/bash/examples/startup-files (in the package bash-doc) # for examples # If not running interactively, don't do anything case $- in *i*) ;; *) return;; esac # don't put duplicate lines or lines starting with space in the history. # See bash(1) for more options HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth # append to the history file, don't overwrite it shopt -s histappend # for setting history length see HISTSIZE and HISTFILESIZE in bash(1) HISTSIZE=1000 HISTFILESIZE=2000 # check the window size after each command and, if necessary, # update the values of LINES and COLUMNS. shopt -s checkwinsize # If set, the pattern "**" used in a pathname expansion context will # match all files and zero or more directories and subdirectories. #shopt -s globstar # make less more friendly for non-text input files, see lesspipe(1) #[ -x /usr/bin/lesspipe ] && eval "$(SHELL=/bin/sh lesspipe)" # set variable identifying the chroot you work in (used in the prompt below) if [ -z "${debian_chroot:-}" ] && [ -r /etc/debian_chroot ]; then debian_chroot=$(cat /etc/debian_chroot) fi # set a fancy prompt (non-color, unless we know we "want" color) case "$TERM" in xterm-color|*-256color) color_prompt=yes;; esac # uncomment for a colored prompt, if the terminal has the capability; turned # off by default to not distract the user: the focus in a terminal window # should be on the output of commands, not on the prompt #force_color_prompt=yes if [ -n "$force_color_prompt" ]; then if [ -x /usr/bin/tput ] && tput setaf 1 >&/dev/null; then # We have color support; assume it's compliant with Ecma-48 # (ISO/IEC-6429). (Lack of such support is extremely rare, and such # a case would tend to support setf rather than setaf.) color_prompt=yes else color_prompt= fi fi if [ "$color_prompt" = yes ]; then PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ ' else PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ ' fi unset color_prompt force_color_prompt # If this is an xterm set the title to user@host:dir case "$TERM" in xterm*|rxvt*) PS1="\[\e]0;${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h: \w\a\]$PS1" ;; *) ;; esac # enable color support of ls and also add handy aliases if [ -x /usr/bin/dircolors ]; then test -r ~/.dircolors && eval "$(dircolors -b ~/.dircolors)" || eval "$(dircolors -b)" alias ls='ls --color=auto' #alias dir='dir --color=auto' #alias vdir='vdir --color=auto' #alias grep='grep --color=auto' #alias fgrep='fgrep --color=auto' #alias egrep='egrep --color=auto' fi # colored GCC warnings and errors #export GCC_COLORS='error=01;31:warning=01;35:note=01;36:caret=01;32:locus=01:quote=01' # some more ls aliases #alias ll='ls -l' #alias la='ls -A' #alias l='ls -CF' # Alias definitions. # You may want to put all your additions into a separate file like # ~/.bash_aliases, instead of adding them here directly. # See /usr/share/doc/bash-doc/examples in the bash-doc package. if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then . ~/.bash_aliases fi # enable programmable completion features (you don't need to enable # this, if it's already enabled in /etc/bash.bashrc and /etc/profile # sources /etc/bash.bashrc). if ! shopt -oq posix; then if [ -f /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion ]; then . /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion elif [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then . /etc/bash_completion fi filol I’m not defensive at all, I swear I don’t need that :D. The theme here is that you keep thinking you don’t have an ass because you’re looking for it on your forehead instead of between your butt cheeks :D
What we can already see:
- sudo is indeed installed, and in path
- bash is running since system is newly installed =>
/usr/binis obviously in path (bash lives in/usr/bin/bash)
set | grep ^PATHwill show that/usr/binis indeed in path, also the fact that grep runs tell it path is correct, since grep lives in/usr/bin/grep:)that said, your user isn’t in the sudoers file because you choose to give login access to root during install (which is strange, because no sudo package get installed if you choose that, so you probably made some other strange not-obvious thing), and no, groupadd can’t be run by the user you keep being after a failed sudo invocation (of course you can invoke it w/ the fully qualified path which is
/usr/sbin/groupaddw//usr/sbinnot in user’s path because the binary here usually require high permissions).now you have a chance to learn something: where is PATH env var configured? Is it in your home or outside? Why and how it gets parsed?
cmon, let’s explore a bit my good boy, let’s be curious about the world that is not wrong by default and only we are right ;) let’s learn stuff, for real
I never said sudo was not installed, I said I wasn’t able to use sudo, which I wasn’t. This is why I went to run groupadd, which is when I discovered that it is not on PATH, which it isn’t. You’re right I shouldn’t have run groupadd as an unpriviledged user, that is fair, although it also isn’t on my root PATH.
You’re also correct that /usr/bin is on PATH, so my initial statement is not correct: /usr/sbin is not on PATH. Forgive me mixing up the two, it didn’t seem like an important disctinction earlier when I recalled the experience off memory.
Going back to my original post though, I was simply stating that every Ubuntu variant I have used sets me up with all this out of the box, meanwhile Debian immediately required more set up. It felt more “raw”. I can see the logic behind these changes, but as a new user it was off-putting as compared with every other distro I had used. That is all my point was. I got around the issue, it was not world-ending, but, to quote earlier me, I “was annoyed”. Simple as. I was sharing my experience with Debian because the pitfalls I encountered seemed relevant to the thread title: coming from Ubuntu to Debian.
now you have a chance to learn something
cmon, let’s explore a bit my good boy, let’s be curious about the world that is not wrong by default and only we are right ;) let’s learn stuff, for real
I am not averse to learning and I have learned a couple of new things, yes. Thank you for the insight. It doesn’t change my initial statement.
your user isn’t in the sudoers file because you choose to give login access to root during install
This makes sense, thanks. I don’t really mind not having sudo from install though, I mentioned it because it is what started me down the “groupadd” road.
so you probably made some other strange not-obvious thing
I followed the graphical install and used default options except for LXDE.
which then I mean, if you don’t have an attention span that lasts at least until the end of other people’s comments, what are you doing here :D
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also let’s be curious about the things we copy-paste in order to prove whatever theory: in literally the first line of your bashrc non-login shells are named. What are those non-login? If we need to defined them like that, do also we have a
non-non-loginones? How do they get executed? How do they get initialized? Let’s explore and understand some new stuff (that we should have learned already, but who cares, it’s not our job!)
I’m curious now so am going to try re-installing from their homepage.
The splash screen (boot screen instead of text)used to get me. It provided by an application called ‘Plymouth’.
You used to need to install it and configure grub, however I think if you go into ‘System Settings’ and type ‘Splash’ KDE has an option to install and choose the screen
Very interesting! Thanks for sharing that. Will probably read up a lot.
