Today is a great day to learn about Debian.

It's far from perfect, but by golly once you learn it it's pretty sweet. Highlights:

• Everything is transparent, sometimes painfully so
• Debian isn't a company
• You still have apt, so deb packages still probably work
• Flatpak makes desktop use easy
• Hate updates? Debian only releases a major new version every two years.
• Nobody is ever, ever, ever going to sell you "Debian Pro"

If Ubuntu's got you down today, I dare you: give Debian a try.

@veronica Debian is the boring bedrock disto. I'd choose it for a web server or obsolete laptop turned electronic typewriter

@fluffykittycat I love it on desktop. Appliance level simplicity and nothing stops you from bolting on newer software using any manner of methods.

Also, shouting this one with the bold text:

Debian isn't just for servers. Debian rocks on a desktop.

"But Veronica, I need newer packages!"

Do you really? If I'm doing dev work and need something newer, I'm using containers. If I need desktop applications, there's usually Flatpak/AppImage/Nix/source. And backporting and pinning is an option if you want to get super nerdy with it.

I don't like when my desktop updates. It means I have to relearn stuff. If you feel the same way, consider Debian. On your desktop. Seriously.

@veronica I left Ubuntu when they tried to turn the GUI into a bad copy of MacOS around... 10.04 I think?

Been using Debian on all of my endpoints ever since then. My wife's desktop runs it. My work laptop runs it. The little box hooked up to the TV in the living room runs it.

@veronica > Do you really?

If you do any gaming, the ancient GPU drivers on Debian are a massive problem.

@k0bin I have used Debian Stable on my HTPC for four years now. Never had an issue gaming.

@veronica, … and anybody who's reading this and can usefully do something to help Debian or its derivatives (thinking mainly of the likes of Devuan and MX) should consider do so. Anything useful, but try to find something you're interested in. Do some bug report triage. Fix a bug. Help with maintenance work – maybe there's, I don't know, some obscure package which you use which isn't getting enough attention? Help out a little with server costs where that's needed.

@veronica This! 👆

Ubuntu is literally the capitalist-enshittified fork of Debian. If you're using Ubuntu and hate that aspect, chances are Debian is exactly what you wanted (but the tech press wasn't popularizing because they're all mouthpieces for capitalism).

@dalias @veronica I tend to use it when possible (and Pi OS is a decent derivative), though there are some times when hardware vendors only validate against / support Ubuntu and Red Hat 🤦‍♂️

@geerlingguy @dalias so often I deployed Ubuntu over Debian simply because the upstream wouldn't technically support Debian. Working with an SLA is "fun."

@veronica

I mean, if you need newer packages, you can run sid.

Sometimes it breaks hilariously, but show me a bleeding-edge distro that doesn't.

@veronica

You know how people dread the next operating system update? Try to put it off as long as the damn thing will let them? That is not a thing on #Debian.

You know how people used to look forward to all the shiny new features in the next major operating system update? That is still a thing on Debian.

I've been running it non-stop for almost 30 years. I was only 12 or 13 years old when I first installed it. It's been my cherished sanctuary ever since.

@veronica

And yeah, I've been running it on desktops and laptops this entire time, in addition to servers.

Debian was my first experience running a server of any kind, in fact. For a little kid to dabble in what was usually reserved for big important companies with million-dollar budgets, it was magical!

Thankfully this was before cyberattacks were as ubiquitous as the cosmic microwave background… 😒 Kids following in my footsteps these days will need to be more careful than I was!

#Debian

@veronica

For a new user, Debian is not that OS that is ready to use upon a fresh install. You're going to have to configure things manually and install many other things, adding 3rd-party repos.

For example, sudo is not even enabled upon install. Debian themselves don't supply truly working non-free media codecs or firmware, so I suggest https://deb-multimedia.org
(think of it as Fedora's RPM Fusion repo).

And as pointed out, yes, a lot of old software. Stable, yes, but old.

#Debian #Linux

@Linux @veronica What do you mean? sudo is enabled if you tell the installer, aka don't set a root password. What is missing on the codec front?

@veronica You can also try Arch (btw) ;)

@ShnoofleBear @veronica Not if you prefer upgrades. Arch is not even able to produce working package dependencies. Like the browser package depending on libre2.so.10 but using libre2.so.9, how the hack can this happen?

@veronica Might even be worth taking a look at Devuan at this point with systemd going so wildly out-of-scope and in a very very dangerous direction. Devuan is basically just plain Debian using a different init. (the classic sysvinit by default.) As far as I know they make no other changes.

Maybe I'm being paranoid... based on everything that's going on right now... but systemd looks really bad right now to me. Dangerous bad.

Only complaint I have is Debian (and by extension others that don't make big changes) is still way back on the 6.12 kernel. I have to install liquorix for modern stuff, but I want something more stable than liquorix...

@nazokiyoubinbou @veronica Where does systemd leave the scope service manager?

@waldi @veronica I'm not even sure what all it does. I know it added DNS handling for some mysterious reason. People using dnsmasq, pihole, etc would run into an error and must manually disable it. There's probably more, but that one I ran into myself.

The big thing right now though that's worrying me is the very instant they heard of OS age-gating being a thing just in California (before even mentioned anywhere else) they rushed against all user opposition to add in userdb with an age field. When users tried to point out there are problems with this (including potentially legal) the thread was closed pretty quickly. If you're keeping up to date, you probably already have systemd-userdb installed. Where it goes from there is unknown obviously, but this is not a good direction.

@waldi @veronica (I do really want to emphasize just how really out there the DNS thing is. I have absolutely no clue why they felt the need to add it. Putting aside how wildly out of scope that actually is, NetworkManager already has an option to do its own dnsmasq integration and that's actually reasonably in scope for it plus users could very easily just install dnsmasq itself anyway, so why systemd thinks it needs to do its own DNS is just... 🤷 )

@nazokiyoubinbou @veronica Where does systemd do DNS?

But okay, don't need to discuss if you do not manage to distinguish between systemd and systemd-resolved, which okay come in the same source, but are pretty much distinct. Maybe you should then drop using udev as well, as this is also part of systemd.

@waldi @veronica You... answered your own question...

If you're treating them as all not being part of systemd, then systemd-userdb isn't either I guess. But I don't know what you want to call it then. "Systemd infrastructure" if you wish.

For all intents and purposes, in the real world this is all "systemd."

@waldi

I'm confused by your statement.

I just installed Debian and the best I could do was use SU (not sudo, but SU). Most newbies wouldn't know that since every guide out there they'd stumble upon would tell them to use SUDO.

@veronica

@veronica Is there a variant of Debian like Mint that's intended for low-end and older hardware? (Asking for my poor laptop that hasn't had its hardware touched since like 2013 because every time I looked into it, it was all too expensive, even though I bought it specifically because it's one that's known to be highly repairable and upgradeable.)

@dartigen @veronica Debian doesn't really do variants, traditionally on Linux distributions there was just one installer, and then you could choose to install any desktop environment of your choice (including multiple ones at the same time²)

So, basically, yes, Debian works just fine on really low end hardware, you just have to select a suitable interface when prompted by the installer.

I believe the most light weight one¹ would be LXDE, but if the 2013 laptop wasn't very low end it could be worth trying with Xfce, which is what Mint uses in its light weight flavour.

These days there are also live images with an installer, and with those you have to select which destktop environment you want on the live image (but then can install any other one at a later time)

debian.org/distrib/ ---> Live Xfce is in the “Try Debian live before installing” section

¹ there are even lighter weight interfaces, but they are quite dated in their UX
² that's what I do on my computers: I have installed both the interface I use and the one my partner prefers, and we can select which one to use at the login screen.

@veronica

The main thing that made Ubuntu easier to install in the past was they included non-free firmware.

Debian decided to ship non-free firmware starting in Debian 12, so it got much easier to install Debian on random hardware.

@Linux @veronica Ah, sorry, I misremembered. The question if root should be used is not shown by default, instead this blob shows up:

Alternatively, you can lock the root account's password by leaving this setting empty, and instead use the system's initial user account (which will be set up in the next step) to gain administrative privileges. This will be enabled for you by adding that initial user to the 'sudo' group.

Can you please open a bug report against debian-installer?

@alienghic the reason I moved from Debian to Ubuntu (for development and household laptop) was because it was easier to get drivers (ie you didn't have to) and in general most things worked well enough to ignore the few kinks.

But if that has gone away, Canonical's LLM dickery can go er away. I was already considering switching back so this is looking like a good time to plan that in.

I like/rely on the multi desktop feature of #Gnome. How easy is it to put that on #Debian, anyone?
@veronica

@veronica been running debian on desktop for years now.

Also "unstable" debian is pretty damn stable, and a good balance (IMHO) between "new" packages and debian stability.

@M0YNG @veronica and if unstable is too unstable for you, testing is right behind it, with more tested packages :)

@mdione @veronica one of my favourite ways to do this is to set my debian version to what the next stable release, I'm currently running forky/sid

Then you gradually zero in on the stable release, getting more and more stable and also keeping current packages.

Then, on release day into stable, change to the next release name!

@Linux @veronica sudo is enabled upon debian install if no root password is set up (otherwise, there is no real need for sudo, since one can use su)

also, since quite a few years deb-multimedia is strongly recommended against, since it has been found to be the cause of various problems that lead people to ask for support on debian channels: personally I haven't had a need to install anything outside of debian repositories to use media online or on dvd since a very long time (although I did have to enable contrib and install libdvd-pkg, which downloads the legally restricted codecs during installation)

@veronica

Nobody is ever, ever, ever going to sell you "Debian Pro"

dang you just made me remember Progeny

@veronica I used to run Debian stable as my desktop and I wanted newer tooling, like Python libraries, Rust binaries, and command line programs, etc.. so I used Homebrew for those. Rock solid base system with cutting-edge dev tooling and command line programs. Other options include using the Nix package manager or an Arch Linux distrobox.

@veronica

Oh right for gui apps flatpak is probably the way to go.

But for some command line tools there's also Debian Backports

https://backports.debian.org/

Debian developers will sometimes recompile newer software for the stable release. It can be worth checking in there.

@veronica I totally share your conclusion. And I'm a member of the release team!

@wouter @waldi @veronica I mean, that's kind of not the point. The point is systemd shouldn't be doing stuff like DNS. It's not remotely within its scope.

Yes you can turn it off. You might even get away with uninstalling the specific package (depending.) But people working on systemd took time and effort to actually write up a systemd-resolved component and push it out as a default to be enabled by default on systems.

NetworkManager (and its built in dnsmasq) would make different DNS configs much better than systemd-resolved. But, even if it didn't, that doesn't mean systemd-resolved should be installed and on by default...

The point is it's not within systemd's scope. Systemd is an init system. It shouldn't be handling networking. That's what networking components are for.

@wouter @waldi @veronica Also it's weird that people are micro-focusing on that. It's only one example of out of scope. Much much scarier and much much more important is the userdb thing and I really seriously think we need to be focusing on that, not trying to defend systemd-resolved (as weird as that is.)

Tell me why you think it's within systemd's scope to start tracking user info and ultimately do stuff like age gating and not, say, the distro itself?

Note that the OS already has its own user handling stuff. Systemd is literally having to add its own on top of that.

@wouter @waldi @veronica That's... insane... I don't even know what to do with that... Imagine if, say, the kernel decided to start handling all that stuff. Just keeping it all in core memory, complicating every single function, interfering with installing stuff (you'll have to remove modules even to install things!)

No, scopes are absolutely a thing.

But, again, the bigger issue isn't providing things, but essentially forcing them. Opt out as a philosophy is harmful and generally about pushing one's choices onto the users then using the excuse "oh they can just disable it" after. Except then they have to personally find out about it and manually disable it just to do (often basic) stuff...

Well, if you're bucking for a corporate CEO position you have the right attitude.

@wouter

That explains it. I didn't use any expert mode and just ran the default setup, which is what most newbies would do.

Also, even as an advance user, I'm adding root. Anyone who read before installing Linux for the 1st time, is going to learn about root.

So the whole thing is not intuitive no matter if you're new and know nothing, or you've educated yourself first. Either way, SUDO is not enabled.

@veronica