All my personal servers/sbcs run Debian
I do enough DevOps at work, I don’t need my free time to be a job too
The NixOS, it callllssss usssssss
come in they ssssaid, itssss delcarativvvveee they ssssssaid.
Wait i just put an environment variable in conifguration.nix and moved home manager back out of my home folder to a central spot why does sddm take 5 minutes to give me Wayland now?
edit: OMG 6 hours later and I have it working. I have a configuration.nix that i re-grew with my 2025 backup and a configuration.nix.slow that is still broken if i switch it out. SDDM timeouts all over the place
the diff between them give 0 indication why sddm would fail.
I kinda want to go back through line by line and find out what did it, but I kinda also want to sleep, eat and go to work in a few hours :)
edit: edit: no rest for the wicked. I ran it through Meld, and there was very little there. Best I can tell, my home manager was synlinked to the wrong config in the store. I’m running it modular, so the nixos-rebuild “should” have moved its configs. The defunct home manager somehow broke QT6 and I lost my file/edit menus in qt apps, the fix for that was a template override env var in configuration.nix. When i fixed the borked home symlink, that failure stopped being a failure and the QT override somehow gave SDDM heartburn. I hadn’t seen it because I rarely change home manager, and whatever was wrong sat that way since 25.11.
Removing the line for QT to ignore the template stopped SDDM/Portal from loading and crashing for 5 minutes straight.
Debian is love. Debian is life.
Debian is the love of Debbie and Ian. ☺️
Yup
I’ve been using Debian on servers for 20+ years, but ended up using Fedora on my desktop and laptop.
Debian is stable, meaning it doesn’t change often. Packages don’t get major version upgrades during the lifetime of a Debian release. That’s fantastic on servers, but can be annoying on clients since you don’t get the very latest drivers, the newest version of KDE, etc. Linux drivers move pretty quickly, especially for newer hardware.
You can run Debian
testing, which is a more up-to-date development branch, but you need to make sure you pull security updates fromunstableas the security team do not upload totesting. https://github.com/khimaros/debian-hybridIf you’re new to Linux, then also consider Linux Mint Debian Edition.
I’m literally the opposite. I have been on Red Hat since Halloween and all servers I have ever touched have been Red Hat or a close fork of RHEL. When I decided to go Linux for my daily driver and more self hosting I went Pop!_OS on my laptop, Linux Mint for my wife, and Linux Mint Debian Edition for all my home systems.
Red Hat is for work. Debian is for life.
Corporations refer to this as work-life balance.
I realize that’s it’s completely irrational, but I hate the name Pop!_OS, such that it may have kept me from checking it out to-date! I think it’s so stupid. And why does it need the exclamation mark?? But maybe I should look into it…
I actually do not recommend it at the moment. They are working on their new DE (Cosmic) so the current stable release is very old.
They have released a newer version with COSMIC as the default DE
How is cosmic? My Pop system is my main system, so I need to be cautious.
It is pretty polished to be daily driven. However you might miss some more features in settings and such if you’re coming from something like KDE.
I have to use Fedora at work (or Windows 11 or MacOS). All our production systems are CentOS, so the supported client Linux distro is Fedora, as they can reuse a bunch of scripts, Chef recipes, etc.
I liked it enough that I started using it at home. I like using the same OS on both work and personal systems. I share scripts and dotfiles between them.
Personal anecdote - a year ago I switched my Framework laptop from Ubuntu to Debian, on ZFS, and it’s been smooth sailing. The kernel is surprisingly new.
ZFS is magic if you have enough storage devices.
I was having all sorts of IO issues because a few shitty HDD cables, and the worst of the observed behavior was some hiccups and freezes sometimes. Hundreds of IO errors, and it was barely sometimes maybe having a pause…
After switching a bunch of cables around and re-scrubbing a few times, I’ve now had zero IO errors for months, and zero OS issues.
I’d hate to think how nasty things would’ve gotten and would still be if those hundreds and hundreds of IO errors were stacking up this whole time.
Been uasing ZFS with USB drives since 2019 or so. On Raspberry Pi 4, then on real computers. My laptop is on a single SSD. ZFS is the only reason I figured I have RAM issues two years ago. No errors would show up on a couple of passes of Memtest86+.
I genuinely do not remember how it acts with one or few devices, but I wouldn’t be shocked to hear the magic extends past replacing raid arrangements or other multi-HDD setups.
This is why I use MX, it is Debian based, but always up to date, for instance I have kernel 6.18.6. Firefox is always the latest a few hours after release, and always in .deb, no flatpak. MX has a couple of their utilities that are useful to setup your system too.
Recently tried MX and definitely +1.
The disclaimer is I haven’t tried too many of the shiny new distros to compare to, but compared to RHEL and Manjaro (ugh), Ubuntu, Mint, and a few other ‘traditional’ choices, MX has been crazy easy to setup and use.
The one thing that hasn’t “just worked” is a USB4 dock that kinda’ works like extra PCIe lanes (it’s just how that style of dock works), which of course the OS is going to freak out if a few PCIe devices suddenly disappear when unplugged. It’s not exactly a hot-swappable protocol!
I’d like to know how to get it working flawlessly, but everything else has been great.
I just run sid (unstable) on my desktop. Still very rare to get a broken package, and when it happens it gets fixed within hours.
I love being on Debian, everything just working and not living in fear of updates. And any software that I must have the latest version of I just install via flatpak, appimage, distrobox etc.
i love running Debian on devices i barely use :D
Yes.
i love running Debian on devices i
barely usenever have to touch :DIs how I would put it!
I love Debian. It
- works
I always go back to Debian. It’s the spiral. Even bought a t-shirt.
Debian is great. but where is the fun in greatness? the jank is what makes computing enjoyable. wabi sabi or something like that.
(i use arch btw.)
Arch on my workstations, Debian on my servers.
This is the way.
i too have debian on my homelab, and arch on my main rig
lets goo debian!!
I use arch (btw) on my personal machine because I hate myself, but on my servers and the computers of people I move off of Windows I always install Debian and KDE/Gnome, for simplicity and stability.
For all the fear mongering about rolling release distros I’ve only been burned once like 5 years ago by some Nvidia driver bug.
I still do the same thing though.
Arch and derivatives always act weird on my system when the time comes to move files.
I never figured out the root cause, but after like two months of use when I move or download files, the system lags extremely bad and hogs all the RAM.
Works just fine on any other distros.
I had a few months where every update broke my WiFi.
A second reboot always fixed it, i never found out the cause.
I’ve been liking vanilla Debian more and more lately. It takes a bit of time to set up properly, and there are some drawbacks for certain software stacks. But in general, rock stable, no muss, barely any fuss.
Once it’s set up, it’s awesome for workhorse servers.
And as long as you don’t need anything cutting edge, it’s not bad as a desktop OS. I used Debian12 with the Plasma DE for a while at a job I had and it was very usable. A few weird issues, but nothing terrible.
I started with Ubuntu 8.10 on Gnome 2, and switched to Debian 8 after Snaps were introduced in Ubuntu 16.04.
I still use Gnome with a very Gnome 2-esque layout. AND default Adwaita. What can I say, it’s digital home for me. Almost every app I use is Flatpak, so it’s always fresh.
Installed Debian last night hoping to try out the freedombox thing. Haven’t had much time with it but so far I’m very pleased. Runs smooth as silk on an old laptop. It also feels very clean and straightforward.
I might ditch MX for vanilla Debian down the line. (Extra points for them disabling data collection by default and having it as a choice)
There’s a reason why Debian is so popular as a base for other distros. It’s just no-nonsense, does what it’s supposed to do, never expects praise just for doing its damn job.
I switched from Mint to Debian recently and it’s been great so far. I’m still getting used to the idea of no “panel” (tasks bar), but I think I will keep it that way since it looks cleaner. I find it really easy to navigate with just keyboard shortcuts. It does really feel universal.
Only issue that keeps bugging me is that for some reason the sound quality on any Bluetooth device is trash. €100 headset sounds like a €10 one. An issue I didn’t have with Mint, Ubuntu or Windows. I haven’t had time to investigate it yet though, maybe something is missing in the default installation and is just a matter of installing the right package.
You could also install any de on top of debian(for example cinnamon if you liked mint or KDE). Even parallel if you like
Or if you don’t want to uninstall and install a bunch of packages there are official flavors of debian https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current-live/amd64/iso-hybrid/
Yeah, I know, but as I said I kind of like it and I think I can get used to it. It’s not necessarily something wrong with Debian, it’s just that I have been a long time windows user, and then used mint also for a long time, so this is just a habit.
There’s also just LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition)
I never actually had to deal with Bluetooth issues on Linux so take this with a grain of salt.
BT audio devices generally support multiple different encodings, for example aptX, but they can always fall back to the most basic and most horrible codec that is universally supported on any BT host device. Sounds like that’s what’s happening. So you might want to look into why your PC isn’t using the better options.
Yes, I thought it might be a code issue. It just seemed weird that with other Debian based distros (ubuntu and mint) I have never had this issue. I hope this weekend I get enough free time to investigate further. Thank you for the tip.
Maybe the necessary codecs just aren’t installed in Debian by default? Mint and Ubuntu are targeted at laptops for general use, so it makes sense they’d bundle all Bluetooth codecs in a default installation to be ready for most users. But Debian makes fewer assumptions like that, and is often used for servers, so perhaps they didn’t want to bloat it with codecs that many installations will never need.
I’m just guessing here, but that makes sense to me.
It’s probably just using the call profile for everything.
https://wiki.debian.org/BluetoothUser/a2dp
This is probably what you’d want to start with. Mint and Ubuntu are probably handling the switch automatically.
Thank you for the suggestion, it might be this. I haven’t had a lot of free time lately, but I hope this weekend I can sit down and investigate.
I’m still getting used to the idea of no “panel” (tasks bar),
I’m using Debian/Plasma and I have a task bar. Maybe it’s optional or depends on environment?
Now you’re making me think I should get rid of my task bar…
Yeah, I completely forgot that during the install Debian gave me multiple choice for the DE. I think I am using GNOME. I don’t remember if I chose it on purpose or it was the default choice and I just rolled with it.
Gnome is typically the default for Debian, if you want that taskbar here is the doc to install KDE Plasma.
Essentially:
sudo apt remove gnome task-gnome-desktop gnome-core gdm -y # alternatively you could also “sudo apt purge *gnome*” but there is a possibility dependencies may get caught up in this sudo apt install kde-full kde-plasma-desktop task-kde-desktop sddm -y # You’ll likely get prompts throughout the install sudo apt autoclean sudo apt autoremove -y sudo reboot
