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DATE: Mon 05 Jul 2021 18:12 By: HexDSL@Posteo.net

Debian: Final Destination?

As I have said in many videos and Trendy Talk Episodes (stay punk!) I regretted installing Endeavor-OS when my Arch install died due to a series of unfortunate events. I should have moved to Debian here and then.

This remained true for months until, this week when I ran 'yay' to be greeted with ten trillion updates. I had a look down the list and realized that I didn't actually care about a single one of the new updates. I sat and waited for the updates to finish. I restarted and everything was exactly the same. No difference at all. Why did I bother? well because the longer I leave it the more updates appear and the higher the chance of having to fix some minor irritation or problem.

I decided it was time to make the jump to stability, linage and sensibleness. It was time for Debian.

I made a video the next day talking about it (YouTube.) The video did really well got almost 1k views in the first day, as well as 8+ likes and 50+ comments which was nice.

The comments seemed to be split between those who totally understood my reasons for moving and those who were convinced that it was a mistake because "Debian is old"

I must note that I am on 'Debian Testing' which was a case of changing a line or two in a sources list and then running an update. So everything after this point is specifically regarding 'Debian Testing'.

While Debian packages are not anywhere near as fresh as Arch packages the idea that its "old" isn't really fair. Its packages are usually no more than six months removed from Arch and the repo is well stocked with applications.

For anything else there's Snaps, Flatpacks and Appimages.

There aren't any applications that I use that will feel stale to me if I don't have brand new versions. And if there is something, I'm quite happy to compile from source.

Now there *was* three concerns for me...

OBS-Studio, Steam and Mesa.

Turns out the version of OBS in the Debian repos is new enough that it has all the features I care about. There is no "browser" source plugin in the repos but honestly, I'm not actually convinced that I even care about that.

Steam works fine! - The first thing I did was mount my Steam Library SSD and fired up Doom Eternal. It ran exactly the same as it did on Arch. There was no difference at all. I tried a few other other games and everything was fine. I installed GE-Proton and that was fine too.

Whatever version of Mesa is in Debian Testing its enough for my needs.

This coupled with Geforce Now and Xcloud leaves me well socked with games to play, basically forever.

I am currently having more than an occasional crash with Quitebrowser but I'm pretty sure I messed something up with the Virtual environment so, I'll report back on that one as soon as I figure it out.

With all the things I care about working fine and not having millions of updates every two seconds I think Debian maybe my end point distro.

Also. Totally had The Best Logo of any Distro right! look at that swirl! just look at it! its adorable!