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.

  • @superbirra@lemmy.world
    1•10 months ago

    lol I’m not defensive at all, I swear I don’t need that :D. The theme here is that you keep thinking you don’t have an ass because you’re looking for it on your forehead instead of between your butt cheeks :D

    What we can already see:

    • sudo is indeed installed, and in path
    • bash is running since system is newly installed => /usr/bin is obviously in path (bash lives in /usr/bin/bash)

    set | grep ^PATH will show that /usr/bin is indeed in path, also the fact that grep runs tell it path is correct, since grep lives in /usr/bin/grep :)

    that said, your user isn’t in the sudoers file because you choose to give login access to root during install (which is strange, because no sudo package get installed if you choose that, so you probably made some other strange not-obvious thing), and no, groupadd can’t be run by the user you keep being after a failed sudo invocation (of course you can invoke it w/ the fully qualified path which is /usr/sbin/groupadd w/ /usr/sbin not in user’s path because the binary here usually require high permissions).

    now you have a chance to learn something: where is PATH env var configured? Is it in your home or outside? Why and how it gets parsed?

    cmon, let’s explore a bit my good boy, let’s be curious about the world that is not wrong by default and only we are right ;) let’s learn stuff, for real

    • @IronKrill@lemmy.ca
      0•10 months ago

      I never said sudo was not installed, I said I wasn’t able to use sudo, which I wasn’t. This is why I went to run groupadd, which is when I discovered that it is not on PATH, which it isn’t. You’re right I shouldn’t have run groupadd as an unpriviledged user, that is fair, although it also isn’t on my root PATH.

      You’re also correct that /usr/bin is on PATH, so my initial statement is not correct: /usr/sbin is not on PATH. Forgive me mixing up the two, it didn’t seem like an important disctinction earlier when I recalled the experience off memory.

      Going back to my original post though, I was simply stating that every Ubuntu variant I have used sets me up with all this out of the box, meanwhile Debian immediately required more set up. It felt more “raw”. I can see the logic behind these changes, but as a new user it was off-putting as compared with every other distro I had used. That is all my point was. I got around the issue, it was not world-ending, but, to quote earlier me, I “was annoyed”. Simple as. I was sharing my experience with Debian because the pitfalls I encountered seemed relevant to the thread title: coming from Ubuntu to Debian.

      now you have a chance to learn something

      cmon, let’s explore a bit my good boy, let’s be curious about the world that is not wrong by default and only we are right ;) let’s learn stuff, for real

      I am not averse to learning and I have learned a couple of new things, yes. Thank you for the insight. It doesn’t change my initial statement.

      your user isn’t in the sudoers file because you choose to give login access to root during install

      This makes sense, thanks. I don’t really mind not having sudo from install though, I mentioned it because it is what started me down the “groupadd” road.

      so you probably made some other strange not-obvious thing

      I followed the graphical install and used default options except for LXDE.

      • @superbirra@lemmy.world
        0•10 months ago

        which then I mean, if you don’t have an attention span that lasts at least until the end of other people’s comments, what are you doing here :D

        • @IronKrill@lemmy.ca
          0•10 months ago

          I read your entire comment and responded to everything relevant. I didn’t break down every sentence word by word because most people don’t enjoy reading those sorts of replies, so I kept it to the bits that required a response. I don’t know what you are talking about at this point, but considering I had the attention span to spend an hour re-installing Debian twice to verify, I don’t think that is the issue here. I have been exceedingly pleasant considering your condescending tone, so your repeated quips and assumptions of the worst are uncalled for.

          I stated an experience I had that I disliked. You stated my experience didn’t happen, and I have laid out how it occured and explained what my initial issue was. I am allowed to dislike how a distro does things while acknowledging it is doing those things intentionally. I thank you for the bits of wisdom amongst your snark, but I’m going to go do more enjoyable things now. And maybe I’ll use Debian on my next server, sorry to disappoint you since you are so determined to gatekeep it (or why else are you so glad I’m not using it?).

        • @Adanisi@lemmy.zipEnglish
          1•10 months ago

          /usr/sbin not being included in PATH by default is definitely annoying, but I understand why it is that way. It’s because they’re infrequently accessed admin tools.

          If it was my decision, I’d include them in PATH though.