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My Thinkpad with Debian and Emacs.
These days I'm forced to stay home, due to this annoying COVID disease (I'm sure you've heard somewhere about this new virus, haven't you?). Fortunately, for me and until now, COVID was nothing more than a bad cold and a little fever. So I can spend my time outside of bed watching TV and playing around, fighting with my computers.
So I made the decision I had been thinking about for some time now. I'm abandoning my trusted Arch Distro in favor of the enemy: Debian.
Why that shameful decision? Sorry, sorry Arch, you were a good companion, but you needed too much care. You've broken yourself far too many times! Sure, nothing unreparable. In almost three years of daily use, I was never forced to reinstall you from scratch. I've always been able to recover the situation using the beloved pen drive with Arch, chrooting in the damaged partition and solving the various problems.
But that is too much for me. Maybe I am not so interested in getting the latest version of all the software on my computer. And maybe the fantastic AUR is not so important to me, because I don't spend so much time testing new software. And I've only installed a few things from AUR in the last few years.
And I want something that never breaks! I want a distro that continues to work even when you're hitting the hard disk with a big hammer and cutting the motherboard with a chainsaw. They told me that Debian is like that.
So those were my thoughts. Let's talk about my hardware.
I have three computers that I use almost daily, in different situations. None of them is particularly recent:
1. an iMac from 2009 with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4 MB of RAM, and the dreadful NVIDIA GEforce 9400 GPU (that GPU was the source of almost all my pain).
2. A mid-2013 MacBook Air with an i5 processor and 4 GB of RAM.That is cute. The only problem is the battery, which doesn't last more than 10 minutes unplugged. I leave this computer at work, so obviously I cannot access it for the moment.
3. A Lenovo Thinkpad T420S equipped with an i7 processor and 8 GB of RAM.It's the last thing to show up.Only two years ago. Good good machine with an ugly screen and terrible audio. But a good, honest machine, after all.
On all three of these computers, I had Arch Linux installed until three days ago.
Obviously, on both the MacBook and the iMac, there was a MacOS before Linux, but I got rid of that when I realized it was becoming slower and slower with the passing of time. At that point, I was starting to think about giving some more money to Tim Cook.
But one day, while messing around with sudo and the MacOS command line, I ended up completely erasing the root partition of my MacBook.Ops.. So I thought: if it's a Mac, I can surely restore a perfectly working computer in a short time and without any effort! That wasn't true. It wasn't true at all.
I spent two days trying to reinstall a usable system. The only result that I achieved by following the Apple way was to obtain a computer with the exact OS that was installed on the MacBook when I bought it in 2013 (more than 5 years earlier). A system so old that it couldn't be updated to the current MacOS version!
So... do you know what? Apple, f**k you!Linux: I am back!
In fact, I was a Linux user before I fell into the Steve Jobs rabbit hole at the beginning of the 10s. So I knew a little of what I was doing.
For the first few months, I installed Linux Mint and its desktop environment, but then I switched to the hardcore Arch + various tiling window managers (DWM, BSPWM, and now XMONAD).
I had got barely the same system installed on all three my computers, with dotfiles and scripts synchronized with Git and I was pretty proud of my configuration.
But...
That is the graphic card of my beloved iMac, and Arch never loved it (and I think Arch was right, I hate it too!). It caused all sorts of problems. Every few weeks, after a Pacman update, it stops working (always at the wrongest moments, BTW), forcing me to troubleshoot via ssh, trying to uninstall and reinstall the driver (the NVIDIA one or the open-source one), changing the kernel between normal and LTS, and reading various solutions that usually don't work. And in any case, never at the first attempt.
And in those moments, I always remembered that in the few months that I spent with the Debian based Linux Mint installed, the graphic card worked without any issue. Hmm...
A day of last November, another Pacman update broke my system completely. Arch went from using kernel 5.14 to 5.15. My iMac stopped recognizing the root partition on boot. I had to boot from a pen drive and spend many hours of my time, finally figuring out that I had to step down the kernel to 5.14 (fortunately I had the previous kernel Pacman package cached).
Then I blocked Pacman from updating the kernel again by modifying the config file. All that lasted for a few weeks, when I read on the Linux kernel mailing list that this particular bug had been fixed.
(Before you ask...no! I couldn't use the LTS kernel because in November, the damned NVIDIA graphic card had decided not to work with LTS!)
And in those moments, I was thinking: Do I really need to use the latest Linux kernel version when all my hardware is almost 10 years old? ... hmm....
So we arrived last week. I had just taken the COVID test that resulted in a positive, and I wasn't in a great mood. You will understand.
I did the usual Pacman update on my Thinkpad. 4.5 GB of stuff after less than a week! I probably made the mistake of not checking how much free space I had left in the root partition... and bang! Pacman exits with an error, and then... there is no more Pacman installed in the system!
I cannot provide any further updates. Actually, nothing works properly in Arch without Pacman! I searched for something online about this problem. I found some complicated solutions that involve rebooting with the pen drive, chrooting the system, etc.
No way!Not that stuff again!
I took a USB disk drive and made a backup of my home folder. That was all I needed. Then I took a USB pen and I burned the debian-11.2.0-amd64-netinst.iso.
Bye-bye, Arch, and hello, Debian!
