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Yes, before choosing Debian, I thought about the possible alternatives:
Noo??? Really??? I don't want to spend hours and hours compiling packages.
Another alternative that seems interesting, although I don't know very much about it. Maybe I'll give it a try when Debian disappoints me.
Maybe it's not Linux that I need. I need even nerdier stuff. Why don't you try FreeBSD? Or OpenBSD? Yes, I could. But for the moment, I lack the courage to take a step like that. It's true that all the software I commonly use is well maintained for both those systems, and anyway, there are the Ports... but I always found myself well with Linus Torvald and his big bloated kernel, so why do I have to change?
That sounds really, really interesting to me. A completely new conception of distro. Furthermore, I know a little about the Scheme programming language, so it will fit perfectly. What scares me is the lack of documentation. If something breaks (and it will certainly do), I probably won't find any clue in the forums or in the wikies about how to fix the problem in a distro so completely different from the others.
Those were my alternatives... but I had heard about Debian since the late 90s, when I first tried to install something other than Windows 98 on my Pentium machine... and more than twenty years later, I continued to hear about it. So I felt that with Debian I couldn't make a big mistake. Could I?
So the first of my computer that has left Arch for good (?) is the Thinkpad. The reason obviously is because my Arch installation has just broken in this computer so I had to do something about it anyway.
But also because the old Thinkpads like mine are traditionally well supported by Linux and its community (I hate this word, but that's another story.)
I always prefer to choose an old fashioned way to install a distro (I come from Arch, BTW). No live images, no calamari. A simple, plain, blue curses interface is what I need.
And this time, I chose to install the system on a single partition.With Arch, I had a separate one for the home directory, but I understood that splitting a tiny 128GB SSD drive in two was not a good idea. I need to be more flexible with the space for the system and for my home folder, and one partition is better for me.
So I created a logical encrypted partition and that's all. Regarding the encryption, btw, I like the fact that the installation process did the trick automatically. With Arch, I had to search for the nature of strange things like PAM, LUKS, etc. Very instructive indeed, but so boring too...
As for the desktop environment, given the eternal struggle between Gnome and KDE, I chose... LXQT! The truth is that I use Xmonad and don't need a DE at all. But installing LXQT gives me a few useful graphical tools for setting up wifi, audio, default applications, and other things, and it surely doesn't waste my poor resources with useless graphic effects.
The installation process proceeded very well, without any issues. In recovering my dotfiles and my scripts from git, I managed to obtain the same workflow that I had on Arch in practically no time. Also the wifi non-free firmware has been installed and worked with absolutely no issue.
I also took the opportunity to write a bash script to reproduce all the steps that I have taken to obtain a working system (like the package installed, the downloads, etc.). This would have been useful for installing Debian on my other computers.
Regarding the oldness of the package, I have almost no complaints to make. Yes, they are obviously older than the Arch ones, but not as old as I was expecting. I think that's because Debian 11 Bullseye was launched in August of last year. It is probably that the versions of the software that I have just installed will remain the same for many, many years to come.
The Firefox browser is quite old. It's the ESR version No. 91. I have overcome this problem by installing Firefox and the Brave browser by...
... sorry, I'm a little ashamed to say it...
Okay, I installed Snapd. I know that the "community" thinks that it's a bad thing. But come on! I never had trouble with it (apart from the dozen or so loop partitions that it creates). It just works, and it's well supported by Ubuntu and Canonical, so I can be reasonably sure that the apps that I install through it, are always genuine and updated.
For the moment, the only real problem that I have is the DHCPCD daemon, which sometimes goes crazy and starts consuming processor resources unnecessarily. I tried to find something about it on the forums. The only thing I found is in an arch forum (yes, that's ironic). It seems that the bug was fixed in version 8.1.1, but the version of Debian Bullseye stable is 7.1.0 (even more ironic!). So, for the time being, whenever I notice an unusually high CPU usage, I perform a simple:
killall -9 dhcpcd
And that always solves the problem.
I spent two days testing my new installation on my Thinkpad, and all seems to be going well.
So it was time to test Debian on the hardest part of my computer. On the iMac and on its damned NVIDIA card. I installed Debian, and I ran my script to configure almost everything. And it worked!!! Everything! On the first try!
Even the graphic! With Arch, I couldn't use the open-source "Nouveau" NVIDIA driver because it breaks the possibility to switch the computer to suspend mode. And with the iMac, I use this feature very much. So I had to install the NVIDIA proprietary garbage from AUR, and that was the cause of all my troubles. That sh*t never worked well, and stopped working with almost every kernel update (that with Arch happens very, very often!).
With Debian instead, the "Nouveau" driver works very well, and there's no problem turning the system to suspend (and waking it up again!).
No problems at all with the wifi firmware either. What do I have to say? Everything went way better than expected.
So... final thoughts.
For now, I'm very happy about my decision. I have no regrets at all. In almost a week of checking updates every day (a very Archy habit), I got this most of the time:
Trovato:1 http://security.debian.org/debian-security bullseye-security InRelease Trovato:2 http://ftp.it.debian.org/debian bullseye InRelease Trovato:3 http://ftp.it.debian.org/debian bullseye-updates InRelease Scaricamento di:4 https://mega.nz/linux/MEGAsync/Debian_11 ./ InRelease [2.433 B] Recuperati 2.433 B in 0s (6.308 B/s) Lettura elenco dei pacchetti... Fatto Generazione albero delle dipendenze... Fatto Lettura informazioni sullo stato... Fatto Tutti i pacchetti sono aggiornati.
Oh! So reassuring!
About the lack of AUR, I managed to find and install every package I used before:
- An updated version of Firefox, Brave, and Telegram from Snap (yes, I can feel your disgust...)
- The synchronization tool for Mega.io directly from its web site in a deb package.
- My beloved Iosevka fonts also from the website in a deb package.
- The youtube-dl replacement "yt-dlp" from the Python package manager PIP.
- For Lagrange Gemini Browser, I had to install Flatpak (Skyjake please! make a snap package too!)
Yes, my Debian experiment is only one week old. Maybe I'll regret my decision very soon, coming back to Arch with the tail between my legs, but for now, no!
I use Debian, BTW!
