• 9point6@lemmy.world
    23·
    4 months ago

    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

    • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
      12·
      4 months ago

      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 :)

    • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caOP
      15·
      4 months ago

      Do you want to live the boring stable life, where you can just build and build and build your personal poop castle on top of that solid OS for years and years? If yes, switch to Debian. You won’t be reinstalling till you get so bored that you get the urge to self-harm (by reinstalling). We can’t afford new hardware anyways, but even if we do, the same install will work on the new system with few tweaks. 😆

      The initial setup is a bit more annoying than Pop/Mint/Ubuntu but not too much more. Upgrades are also a bit more annoying but not too much more. There’s good documentation for both of those procedures.

    • Adeptus_Obsoletus@piefed.socialEnglish
      3·
      4 months ago

      It’s just the matter of defaults, especially since Mint has Debian edition too. Personally I just cut off the “middleman” and go straight to Debian. Unless you really like Cinnamon, because you’ll obviously have better experience on Mint with it.

    • The Picard Maneuver@piefed.worldEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      I just did this as a complete noob. Well, PopOS is still on my gaming rig, but my secondary PC is now Debian.

      I expected it to be way more barebones, but it turns out that my experience has been like 90% identical.

    • gigachad@piefed.socialEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      I run Mint with Cinnamon on my Desktop PC and Debian with Gnome on a mini PC. I use the latter as a server and disabled the GUI, but Gnome was hard to get used to. I use my PC for casual gaming, browsing, and casual Python development. I am not a Linux power user but pretty familiar with the terminal. Setting up native Python without relying on UV/conda on Debian was a nightmare, but I guess that’s an edge case. I really love Linux Mint, and I also really like Cinnamon.

      • dan@upvote.au
        2·
        4 months ago

        If you’re used to Windows then maybe give KDE a shot. Similar concepts to Windows (like a taskbar at the bottom of the screen) but extremely customizable. You can install KDE on Debian - on an existing system, the easiest way is to run tasksel and select KDE Plasma.

        • dalekcaan@feddit.nl
          2·
          4 months ago

          I’m fairly new to Linux and I’ve been using Kubuntu, and so far I really like KDE coming from a lifetime of using Windows.

        • gigachad@piefed.socialEnglish
          0·
          4 months ago

          I disabled the graphical interface as I use the mini PC with Debian as a server and only ssh to it. I used Ubuntu with gnome at work for a couple of years (I could ignore it back then with the Ubuntu theme, which I liked more)

          Never tried out KDE, I know it is very popular. But I am super happy with Cinnamon and I don’t see a reason to switch on my main PC. Of course I grew up with Windows, that may explain why I get along with Cinnamon so well…

          • dan@upvote.au
            1·
            4 months ago

            I disabled the graphical interface as I use the mini PC with Debian as a server and only ssh to it

            Oh yeah, that makes sense.

          • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
            1·
            4 months ago

            Yeah, I mean Cinnamon matches what Windows does really quite closely, down to even the default keyboard shortcuts being virtually the same.

            KDE doesn’t match it quite as closely, but it’s just power-user heaven…

      • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        4 months ago

        Python without UV/Conda is always somewhat of a pain on Linux, well, if you need a specific version that is. It comes pre-installed on virtually all distros, because the distros use it themselves to script stuff in the OS. That also means, if you install a different Python version OS-wide, you can break those OS scripts.

        Admittedly, it is somewhat of a larger pain on Debian, though, because it will stay behind on older Python versions for longer than most other distros. After the Python 2→3 transition, they also continued to alias python to python2 for quite some years (I’m actually not sure, if they alias to python3 by now)…

  • Cora@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    4 months ago

    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.

  • dan@upvote.au
    6·
    4 months ago

    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 from unstable as the security team do not upload to testing. https://github.com/khimaros/debian-hybrid

    If you’re new to Linux, then also consider Linux Mint Debian Edition.

    • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
      2·
      4 months ago

      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.

      • dan@upvote.au
        1·
        4 months ago

        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.

      • Janx@piefed.socialEnglish
        0·
        4 months ago

        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…

        • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
          1·
          4 months ago

          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.

              • DM294@sh.itjust.works
                1·
                4 months ago

                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.

    • Magister@lemmy.world
      1·
      4 months ago

      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.

      • MotoAsh@piefed.socialEnglish
        1·
        4 months ago

        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.

    • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caOP
      1·
      4 months ago

      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.

      • MotoAsh@piefed.socialEnglish
        3·
        4 months ago

        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.

        • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caOP
          2·
          4 months ago

          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+.

          • MotoAsh@piefed.socialEnglish
            1·
            4 months ago

            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.

  • Carrot@lemmy.today
    5·
    4 months ago

    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.

    • tempest@lemmy.ca
      5·
      4 months ago

      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.

      • Pika@rekabu.ru
        1·
        4 months ago

        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.

      • Hule@lemmy.world
        1·
        4 months ago

        I had a few months where every update broke my WiFi.

        A second reboot always fixed it, i never found out the cause.

  • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
    4·
    4 months ago

    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.

  • invictvs@lemmy.world
    2·
    4 months ago

    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.