Switched from Ubuntu to Debian yesterday
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.
I tried installing Debian recently as well but didn't get too far into it. I was annoyed at the base configuration* though. I wasn't able to use sudo, so I went to add myself to the sudo group and it told me the command didn't exist... I looked it up and realised that
/usr/sbin* wasn't on terminal path. Extremely fixable but something I never ran into on other distros, made me nervous how many other tweaks I may have to do.I was simultaneously testing Lubuntu and ended up sticking with that after following install instructions for another app kept complaining about bookworm errors. Perhaps the Debian version was too new?..
* Edited a couple of details to make them more accurate.
I suppose it depends on a lot of things. Errors are pretty common once you start installing a lot of apps in any distro imo. Especially unstable and sid are more up to date but as the name suggests less stable.
As far as I know I was on the stable version. I downloaded the one right on their front page, which was 12.4.0 net install.
Thats stable atm. No clue what it was back then. It took me a bit to add myself to the sudo group since sudo visudo doesn’t work. No idea what the use of that is.
you obviously can't use
sudo visudoif you're not already in the sudoers file LOL - is the same security, which you also desire, as having a spare set of keys in the bowl at the entrance to your house, where, however, no one comes unless they already have a key to open the doorI made a mistake, fine. Visudo doesnt work either from my recent experience. At the very least, it should say „dont use sudo as root“ instead of „the command doesnt exist“.
You could have explained it without the elitist touch. Tyvm
I added my user to the sudo group and rebooted (as relogging doesnt work either).
So, debian is cool but you can definitely see how fanboiism keeps it from being great.
beside op's bashrc fud, it's a common newbie misconception that testing and sid are not stable like some kind of exotic experimentation would make them so. It is more a stabilization process in respect to the project's policy/processes and you will definitely find /usr/bin in pathh in either testing and sid rofl
lol, no. PEBKAC
Well, I don't know what to tell you when I had just installed and the system tells me the command does not exist, so I look up the error and adding the path to bashrc fixed the issue. The only PATH export in that bashrc file is the one I added after searching the issue.
It was probably
/usr/sbinyou're thinking of rather than/usr/bin. IIRC -- don't quote me on this -- Red Hat puts it in non-root user paths by default, and Debian doesn't.You're correct. That's one of the few useful things superbirra mentioned, and I've updated the parent comment to correct my initial error. I was recalling from memory and just remembered it was a "bin" folder.
I'm curious now so am going to try re-installing from their homepage.