Tips for switching to Debian from Ubuntu?
Title pretty much says it all. I've been using ubuntu as my daily driver for the last 5 years or so and honestly, I've had a wonderful experience with it.
That said, with the way things are going, I feel like its only a matter of time before Canonical pulls the rug out so I'd like to at least get my feet wet with something other than Ubuntu and Debian seems like the logical choice.
I mainly use my machines for gaming, self hosting, programming, and weird networking projects/automation testing.
I've heard gaming on debian isnt as 'out of the box' as it is with Ubuntu. So I'm hoping somone with more experience can share some tips on what I should be looking out for or point me to some good guides. Thanks yall.
EDIT: I fucking love this community. Thank you all for your replies. I appreciate you taking the time to help me out.
Use the net installer. Leave the root password empty if you want sudo installed. There is probably no need for you to read the official installation manual, but maybe do so if you run into any trouble.
There are wiki pages for the most common things you might want to setup, like how to install steam, nvidia driver, enable backports (good way to get (some) newer packages without breakage), and enable flatpak. Just google "debian wiki nvidia" etc.
Holy shit I never knew you could have sudo installed like that. Always done it post-install lmao
Yeah it actually says that in the text on that root password screen. But nobody ever reads that, me included. Literally everybody I have told this to was surprised when they hear about it. It's a total UI failure.
It says it? TIL
I knew about that (kinda intuitively, openSUSE installer behaves the same way and I just assumed that Debian would be the same)
Same lol, I was confused at why some of my selfhosting boxes had sudo and some didn't, despite being installed fresh from the same ISO
Why not use doas instead of sudo?
@finickydesert @gnuhaut The installer installs sudo.
Also, what are the advantages of doas compared to sudo?
afaik, doas is a bit more minimal than sudo, so less bloatware. Sudo has a lot of CVE's every year and because doas is way smaller, it has a lot less security issues.
Protip: for anyone in the fence, you can install doas then simply alias sudo for doas. Nothing changes in how you use your shell but it's now more secure
Maybe a bit naive, but what is the way that things that are going? What would Canonical pulling the rug out look like?
Canonical has been pushing their less portable Snap solution and moving away from traditional packages.
This means:
If you're already into self hosting, programming, networking and automation then I don't think you'll have any trouble.
With that background you should be able to google the solutions.
Debian offers you 3 variants of Debian:
Debian stable (what you get by default from their homepage). https://wiki.debian.org/DebianStable
Debian testing (has newer packages than stable and breaks less often than Debian unstable). https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting
Debian unstable (has the most recent packages and is considered the most fragile of all). https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUnstable
+1 for using debian with the testing repo, never had issues with it and it's more up to date than debian stable.
Use configuration as code. Ansible, puppet, salt, nix or something else. Debian is nice but its a diy ubuntu. You appreciate the effort cononical puts in to take away the rough edges on places. Using debian allows you to craft the OS you want from scratch, which is great! Just make sure you don't have to redo work if your system dies at some point.
It's funny, I installed Debian not knowing this, and I had very few rough edges to work out. One setting in Firefox to fix video playback, and I was up and running on my home theater PC.
Switch to Fedora I would say. Debian is up to date currently, as things are settling down to be LTS, but over the years it will get fewer updates. Fedora is even more up to date than Ubuntu, but more stable than Opensuse Tumbleweed, which would be the Opensuse equivalent.
If you want a perfect experience with KDE, I dont know what to recommend but there are bugs that will probably simply not be fixed in Debian for the next 2 years, as they are postponed to Plasma 6, mainly the glitches when fractional scaling.
Gnome is really stable I think, Fedora should give the best experience here.
Btw using Distrobox you can run ANY Linux app easily. On Fedora Kinoite (ostree, like Silverblue) I run the VLC 4.0 beta currently, which is only available as an Ubuntu PPA. no problem at all. Do mainly for AUR or Ubuntu PPA apps Distrobox is brilliant.
Fedora itself also has COPR where lots of community packages are.
If you want recent deb-based, there also is KDE Neon user edition. Used that for a while, but I switched to immutable Fedora and never going back.
Fedora is fantastic, but I'm a little shaken about Redhat, which is downstream of Fedora and a big supported.
Also, Fedora is a bit annoying with codecs and non-free software in general. They are extremely anal about not infringing copyright.
I've done my share of distro hopping and I must agree with Pantherina@feddit.de.
Fedora has the near perfect balance of being stable and always up to date. I found the codecs and non-free software to be a non-issue. You enable the RPM Fusion repos and install then like anything else.
Someone familiar with Ubuntu is going to have no trouble at all with Debian.
As for updates, there's always upgrading releases, or Testing/Unstable.
Okay true, there is Debian testing aka sid. I have not tried that long term though.
But I absolutely dont agree "being used to ubuntu". Either you are a GUI person and the interface is not the same. Its GNOME and you need some extensions, thats it.
Or you are from Ubuntu and want proprietary packages, PPAs, or even Snaps! They seem pretty user friendly witg some features.
Or you want the nice background...
But apt? You just use
sudo dnf upgrade" instead ofsudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade`. The rest is Linux, everything is probably the same. Maybe some udev stuff, but apart from ADB (which is kinda poweruser stuff) its not actually needed.You may want to try pop_os if one of your main uses is gaming. But debian is very straight forward after you enable the non-free repos.
I'm consistently amazed how intuitive and responsive the pop os interface is even on low end hardware. It is so polished and adds so much utility to using a GUI, or even using multiple terminals.
I'm glad someone already suggested this. I was going to do the same.
Just Mint it dude
I just switched from Linux Mint to Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). I was feeling like you; wanting to get away from Ubuntu dependency. I tried out Debian, but it just didn't feel as comfy out of the box. LMDE is working great. I even enabled backports and updated the Kernel.
Just learn how to activate the non-free repos. Everything else except for the stupid stuff like snap that ubuntu introduced, is 99.5% the same. I've switched from Ubuntu to Debian like 15 years ago. Never looked back.
If you install Steam/Lutris/Bottles as a Flatpak it will use an updated Mesa stack when you run games through them. If you need a newer Linux kernel you can use the official backported version or something like Xanmod's MAIN branch/Liquorix.
That's pretty much it, and you may not even need those changes depending on your hardware. I recently wrote a comment on how I use Debian Stable if you want some extra opinions on how to make Debian Stable a little more livable.
Depends on what your hardware is. Debian typically runs some older versions of pretty much everything. If you have newish hardware, you might need to run a newer kernel than Debian ships by default for full support. When that happens to me, I usually run the Liquorix kernel packages, which has been around for more than a decade and has never caused me problems on Debian.
For some graphics drivers, you might need a newer Mesa, which is typically available from Debians' own backports.
Don't do either unless you know you need to, because both lead to a somewhat higher risk for an unstable system.
You can just install Steam using Flatpak, and it works just fine.
On server I found it to be basically the same except for some installed programs. Dunno about gaming doe.
Why not try Mint? Also Debian based
Standard Mint is based on Ubuntu, but they modify it to remove things they don't like, and can hold back cutting edge changes that might break things. They also give you the option to not use the Snap Store.
There's a Mint Debian Edition that is forked directly from Debian. This might be better for OP, as it's not going to get anything that Ubuntu has added. However, Ubuntu and Mint add their own fixes, so it might be missing those, depending on whether Debian decided to implement them.
*Ubuntu based
Still shares the same debian root but doesn't solve the not-wanting-to-use-ubuntu issue
Install your base system and get every app you need using flatpak. That way you'll get the latest versions without poluting your system. It even integrated with the GNOME Software "store" GUI: https://flatpak.org/setup/Debian
A bit out of the loop here (my only Linux system is a stripped down Debian server), but I thought one of the reasons people are moving away from Ubuntu was because they were forcing everyone to use flatpaks.
Genuinely asking - are they evil or not?
other way around – Ubuntu has pretty much abandoned Flatpak and is trying to get everyone to use Snap
Ahh got it, thank you!
Oh, this is the first time I've heard of that. I use plasma-discover as my handy "search all 3 app sources at once" browser.
No idea if Ubuntu does some things better for gaming, but I just use the Steam Flatpak (+ the "steam-devices" package for much better controller support) and the Heroic Game Launcher Flatpak. Everything works fine on my end. I'm currently using an AMD card, but will probably switch to an Intel Arc in the near future (since they have better performance for 3d rendering in Blender, and I'm fed up with Nvidia's prices).
I doubt you would need any tips, also right now Bookworm is closer to upstream than Ubuntu, so it's better fit for gaming sans some niche missing package scenarios that won't matter if you heavily rely on flatpaks.
The only major thing Ubuntu has over Debian is the normie friendly graphical , but it's not great so /shrug .
Also Canonical is not going to pull the plug, that's one thing you don't really have to worry about, unless they sell the company.
Tangential question for people browsing this post: would you recommend a different Linux distribution over Debian and Ubuntu for OP? If so, which one and why?
Depends on what you're looking for.
Up to date packages: Arch or Fedora
Stable: Rocky or Mint
I personally love Arch for its lightweight nature, its documentation, and the AUR, but I use Fedora on my desktop and server, and Debian on my HTPC. I also have Rocky on my laptop, but that was mostly just to play around with it.
Fedora is nice because it's fairly up to date and has a fairly robust, self maintaining package manager (i.e. it automatically removes unused deps and cleans up after itself).
You should try MX Linux, with Xfce it works pretty well, it's Debian based.
Don't, unless you like snaps.
I think you misread the OP.
Worse than that, I didn't read beyond the topic. The question itself creates like this automatic PTSD response. ;)
Since you've been fiddling with Linux for a while... why not switch to Arch Linux instead? Even the official iso has an kISS installer that is really easy to get used to (archinstall).
Tips for switching from Ubuntu to debian: don't... It's literally just Ubuntu with older packages and extra steps