this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024

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150

Switched from Ubuntu to Debian yesterday (lemmy.giftedmc.com)

submitted 9 months ago by haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com to c/linux@lemmy.ml

74 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 28 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Petter1@lemm.ee 26 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 8 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The fact that you report bugs you find makes you nothing short of a legend.

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 8 points 9 months ago

Thank you very much. This made me smile. Being kind to others makes you the same btw. :)

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[–] savbran@feddit.it 17 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] N0x0n@lemmy.ml 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] dasenboy@lemmy.ml 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Don't you mean Sid (unstable) ? :)

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[–] GravitySpoiled@lemmy.ml 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Thx for the post. Nice reading your experience.

Fluffychat flathub https://flathub.org/apps/im.fluffychat.Fluffychat

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 2 points 9 months ago

Thanks. I failed to mention that I found fluffychat from flathub shortly after through their website. :) but thanks for mentioning it.

[–] Frederic 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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")

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Celediel@slrpnk.net 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 3 points 9 months ago

Thanks for mentioning it! I‘ll check it out!

[–] Zamundaaa@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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).

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Loucypher@lemmy.ml 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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!

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 2 points 9 months ago

Thanks for mentioning it. I‘m glad I‘m not the only one „using Linux“ instead of „living Linux“.

[–] BaalInvoker@lemmy.eco.br 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Next step: try Arch Linux

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 16 points 9 months ago (6 children)

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.

[–] BaalInvoker@lemmy.eco.br 4 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 13 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] itchick2014@midwest.social 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You put this a lot better than I could. Its exactly what my experience was as well.

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[–] Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] BaalInvoker@lemmy.eco.br 2 points 9 months ago

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...

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[–] jao@lemy.lol 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I am running an Arch based distro called Garuda, and it's been perfectly fine for me.

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 10 points 9 months ago

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.

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[–] BaumGeist@lemmy.ml 6 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] bremen15@feddit.de 8 points 9 months ago

I run Debian since 1998 and am happy.

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 3 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I have been happy with Pop!_OS but the idea of LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) is very tempting.

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I have not tried pop os yet. Whats the selling point again?

[–] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Sounds promising. I‘ll keep an eye out. Thanks for explaining.

[–] pelotron@midwest.social 2 points 9 months ago

Keep an eye out for Cosmic Desktop release news.

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[–] Loucypher@lemmy.ml 3 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] AnneBonny@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

KDE is the default DE for Debian these days?

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 16 points 9 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] AnneBonny@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

debian in opposition to ubuntu gives you a choice at install

That's nice.

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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“

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[–] PunkFlame@lemmy.ml 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

(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).

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[–] LassCalibur 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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!

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 2 points 9 months ago

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.

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