My Debian Experiment is coming to an end
For the last couple of months I’ve been using Debian. I thought id share a few of my thoughts and give you some idea if Debian might be a distribution for you to try.
Welcome to Debian
Why Debian?
I haven’t actually used Debian for any significant time and wanted to give it a good run. Its a pure community based distribution that is the bases for pretty much every Debian based distribution out there. Its goal is to provide a stable multi-functional free distribution and that’s exactly what it ends up being. I wanted to see how it run, if it gave me what I wanted and run something that was solely community run.
The install
There’s really no option for a live install these days with Debian. There current live cd doesn’t support UEFI so you’re kind of stuck with the basic net iso or graphical/curses install.
I went for the graphical install and imaged it to a USB, simple enough there’s nothing fancy about it. Its dated though,
it reminds me of a windows install where it can’t detect or support your native resolution. I think they need to catch up
in that regard (it pales in comparison to Fedoras installer)
Saying that, the install its self was painless. It does exactly what you’d expect.
One positive I have from the install is there’s no “spins”, you get one install, you pick the desktop environment you want
during the install and you install it. This is how it used to be done with every distro, but more recently distros support one desktop environment in their install and offer spins of the distro with the other desktops (think ubuntu gnome, kubuntu, fedora kde/xfce, etc).
I think this is a side effect of it trying to be a universal distro, it doesn’t assume to know what you want and has enough options in the installer to allow you to setup a base install that is what you want. More distros need to go back to doing this in my opinion as I think.
First boot
Debian just works. there isnt much else to say on this. I made two major changes from the default instillation. the first was to enable the contrib and non-free parts of the repository. This was to allow me to download the AMD binary blobs for drivers. Unlike Fedora, Debian does have an official repo for non-free software, something that keeps them from being listed as a fully free distro by the FSF but there not enabled by default so you have to make a conscious decision to enable them.
The second major change was to update to sid.
Why is it so old? Lets fix that
I moved to sid, sid is good, sid is wonderful! Did I have to? When it really comes down to it, probably not. I moved for one big reason, more up to date desktop environments and the only issues I came across were caused by the current Debian transission to gcc5 where some packages where not available or caused a dependency issue.
The actual move to sid was as easy as it was enabling the contrib and non-free repos. I changed the repo name to sid and ran aptitude update; aptitude dist-upgrade
If you decided to run sid theres an aptitude extension called apt-listbugs that can be useful to show if packages have any outstanding bugs. I installed it and it was useful though i never encountered any problems with the applications it flagged but i decided to install.
Oh packages where are you, the tale of Krita
Being on sid means I actually have very recent packages, with the exception of one. Krita.
Its not there, mainly i’ve found because there having a difficult time getting the packages all in
line, no fault of anyone’s, KDE is a big change for Debian with lots of restructuring. But this gave
me the opportunity to try out the alpha of Krita 3 from source.
Building it however was pretty easy, sid has all the dependencies I needed, and updating the package is a
quick git pull and make -j6; make -j6 install
The oddities of Debian
Sid for the most part has been remarkably stable considering im running it through a gcc5 transission.
I came across only one or two odd behaviors which seem more to do with odd configuration issues than anything else.
For example, for some reason i recently lost my middle click paste functionality.
In staying that, I think you could comfortably run testing or sid as a daily drivers without issue, but if there was nothing specifically that you needed from the testing repos staying on stable gives you a rock solid distribution. If you have everything you need from it you wont see any faults.
If your just on stable, your in for a rock solid time, with one exception. In using Debian I noticed it interacts with systemd in odd ways, I only saw this in one instance when I tried to change desktop managers from gdm to sddm.
On a normal system you would use systemctl disable gdm; systemctl enable sddm. However because the Debian package manager likes to configure things the process seemed to be not to use sytemctl but to use dpkg-reconfigure, which didn’t actually work for me, and neither did sytemctl (in this specific case).
I’m not used to apt so i might have done something wrong, but this seemed like an odd way of doing things and I wonder if its maybe a bug in there integration.
What next for Debian?
At the time of writing this up I decided if I was going to stay with Debian or not. I decided not to. But let me tell you why you should consider it, and the big positives I took from it.
-
It’s a pure community distro
Debian has a sort of for the people by the people feel to it. It is the only major distribution that is community run with no major corporate backer. -
it’s the universal distro
Debian hits a good balance in my opinion of being a multi-functional distro, it is in essence similar to Gentoo in that regard in that it can be purposed for almost any task. It supports a multitude of platforms and does not assume to know what you want. -
it’s well supported
It’s Debian. Its really well supported. -
A release is supported for a good 5 years
This is a good point for people who really want a stable long term environment, be it desktop, server, or otherwise, Debian has a long track record of providing long term release support for each release.
Why did I leave? I landed on Fedora 23. While Debian has some major selling points (especially when considering the non-OS points of the community side. I wanted my desktop to be a little more on the leading edge and found that Fedora provides that more than Debian does for me needs.
My lasting conclusion is that Debian is an excellent distro, that’s stable and very well supported with a great community behind it, and if any of the selling points above agree with you, give it a go.
