Longtime Arch user, first time Debian enjoyer

As the title says, I’ve been using various flavours of Arch basically since I started with Linux. My very first Linux experience was with Ubuntu, but I quickly switched to Manjaro, then Endeavour, then plain Arch. Recently I’ve done some spring cleaning, reinstalling my OS’s. I have a pretty decent laptop that I got for school a couple years ago (Lenovo Ideapad 3/AMD). Since I’m no longer in school, I decided to do something different with it.

So, I spent Thursday evening installing Debian 12 Gnome. I have to say, so far, it has been an absolute treat to use. This is the first time I’ve given Gnome a real chance, and now I see what all the hype is about. It’s absolutely perfect for a laptop. The UI is very pleasing out of the box, the gestures work great on a trackpad, it’s just so slick in a way KDE isn’t (at least by default). The big thing though, is the peace of mind. Knowing that I’m on a fairly basic, extremely stable distro gives me confidence that I’ll never be without my computer due to a botched update if, say, I take it on a trip. I’m fine with running the risks of a rolling distro at home where I can take an afternoon to troubleshoot, but being a laptop I just need it to be bulletproof. I also love the simplicity of apt compared to pacman. Don’t get me wrong, pacman is fantastically powerful and slick once you’re used to it, but apt is nice just for the fact that everything is in plain English.

I know this is sort of off topic, I just wanted to share a bit of my experience about the switch. I don’t do much distro-hopping, so ended up being really pleasantly surprised.

teawrecks,

I’ve never run Debian, but I did use Fedora on a laptop with Gnome for several years and it was rock solid.

Shareni,

Check out MX. It has some nice tools and defaults to make Debian better as a desktop distro.

Debian + Nix (home-manager) gives you a stable system and bleeding edge userland packages. It’s a perfect combo.

tfowinder,

I once installed MX Linux KDE spin after using manjaro around 2021.

Found out that almost all applications lacked features, specially Okular ( Pdf reader ). It also felt less visually pleasing out of the box.

Hence is switched back to Arch based distros.

genie,

I tried Debian + Nix once upon a time too. Honestly flatpaks and containers did everything I needed and more, and every dev team I’ve been on already has familiarity with the container workflow.

I’m a huge fan of Debian and Nix, don’t get me wrong, but it was shy of perfect for my use case. Glad it works for you though! I’ve been using Fedora + Nix home-manager with flakes for almost two years and I don’t think I’ll ever go back

Shareni,

Flatpak is imperative. Nix gives me less headaches than docker. I haven’t tried distrobox.

Why Fedora? That’s what I initially started with, but it was less stable than arch on my t480, nix unstable has newer packages, and I couldn’t get nix to work with selinux.

genie,

Haha I’ve had a journey to get here, all because I have a 12th gen Framework.

Initially I got Debian Sid working but ran into power management issues with the module system. I switched over to arch and loved that for a while but frankly I was too careless and kept breaking my system. The way I use Arch it wasn’t a stable daily driver. Then I switched over to NixOS and loved it, but I bricked 3 of 4 ports with a firmware update (again me being careless). Graciously, Framework helped me fix the issue.

After all of that I decided to go with a distro that is officially supported by Framework. Between Ubuntu and Fedora I choose Fedora since they don’t have ads for Ubuntu Pro :) I also like SELinux by default and wanted to broaden my horizons

TheAnonymouseJoker,

Now, use these extensions (ignore the one disabled).

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/f0b1ee11-f5f8-4541-81b8-2f3d6ebd8505.png

My setup:

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/0e8ed96c-dd6a-4c80-9ce1-603b0fd9d8a6.jpeg

michael_palmer,

Just installed Alpine linux with Gnome on my old laptop (i3-3217u with 4Gb RAM). It works really smooth, much faster than Linux Mint with Cinnamon. Aftter tweaking OpenRC run levels my boot time is only 25s (i’m using the cheapest 120Gb SSD)

TheAnonymouseJoker,

Yeah any SSD, even the $20-25 one, works out well. It even works out for a debloated Windows 10 if you were to dualboot. And people that really blindly shit on GNOME still live in 2012. Glad to see you find it good.

danielfgom,
@danielfgom@lemmy.world avatar

I agree. I did a lot of distro hopping when new to Linux to try all the desktops and have the latest apps etc. But after years of that I just wanted something stable that will be reliable and I don’t have to maintain.

I installed Linux Mint Debian Edition 6 as soon as it was released and it’s fantastic. Stable Debian base with Cinnamon on top. I couldn’t be happier.

I’ve always been confused by pacman/arch in general and always preferred apt which I find straightforward.

As one who worked in IT for years, I’m tired of micro managing systems and unnecessary complications. Linux Mint Debian Edition/Debian + apt just keeps it simple.

Timeshift is a must. Creates a system restore point in the event that an upgrade goes wrong and it really works well. I highly recommend that to all Linux users.

I also like Warpinator which is Linux Mint’s version of airdrop. Works between my android and my pc perfectly.

And there is tons of help online for Debian, unlike other distros.

narc0tic_bird,

To me, the best OS will always be the one that gets out of my way as good as possible. That includes stability, maintenance, compatibility, usability and sensible defaults. I don’t want to deal with the OS when I’m trying to get stuff done or I’m looking for entertainment.

And yeah, Debian is pretty good at most of those things.

nik282000,
@nik282000@lemmy.ca avatar

As much Gnome can be a pain to customize, out of the box I still like it for its get-out-of-the-wayness. Tap the super key, type a few chars of the name of software you want to run, hit enter and its back to being a taskbar. Very similar to tab completion in the terminal for me.

bigmclargehuge,
@bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world avatar

I struggle daily between wanting exactly what you describe, while also wanting to have my grubby little fingerprints on every square millimeter of my system. I think I’ve found the middleground now with a portable, “lazy” Debian system, which will mostly handle lighter use, and my dedicated Arch desktop where I go full nerd mode, experimenting and fiddling to my hearts content.

jjlinux,

I won’t speak to the distro part of this, as this is too broad a subject, and there are too many distros I like for different use cases. Now, about Gnome, which is my favorite DE, second only to Cosmic (yes, the Gnome based one), has 1 issue since version 45 that made me jump ship to KDE 6 (which I’ve been able to set up fairly close to how I used Gnome, with some trade-offs) and that is Gnome’s choice of not allowing any Screen Shot app to work, other than their own, using the current Apple justification that “it’s for the user’s own security”, which is complete and utter bullshit. Sure, I can force run Flameshot from the terminal, but who wants to do that? I want mi screnn shot app to work from the Print-Screen key, as it should. I do miss everything else about Gnome, for sure, but I screen shot and annotate them too much to go through all the steps that are required to make it happen in Gnome 45.

authed,

I tried Debian a few times and never liked it… I like the Arch experience better.

folkrav,

I’m genuinely curious what you consider to be the “Arch experience”, other than pacman.

Amongussussyballs100,

This probably does not relate too much to arch, but on Debian I found it extremely annoying to be unable to use reboot and shutdown from terminal. That was the dealbreaker for me.

thayer,

Hmm, why are you not able to shutdown/reboot from the terminal? I don’t have any Debian systems running at the moment (other than Proxmox), but I’ve used Debian for over a decade and never had any issue using the terminal for power management functions (Proxmox included).

Amongussussyballs100, (edited )

Sorry for the late reply, I also did not have a Debian system running. Installed it on an old laptop I had lying around to find the error. Seems like its due to Debian changing something around debian 10. Its still possible with systemctl reboot.

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/9e01d2b0-dae3-42e9-bdce-188a32178fe8.jpeg

N0x0n, (edited )

Maybe try this:

shutdown -P now

-P argument is for poweroff, there is probably one for reboot.

You must be root to use this command.

thayer,

Ah, gotcha. I think that’s just due to /sbin not being included in the PATH environmental variable for non-root users. Running sudo <command> will work in those cases.

ricdeh,
@ricdeh@lemmy.world avatar

systemctl poweroff ``systemctl reboot

signalsayge,

On Debian, you have to be root or a sudoer. Those commands are there, just not in the path of regular users.

tfowinder,

Use sudo reboot

authed,

Install process/freedom of choice for more things (It’s more of a blank slate)

dinckelman,

These kind of posts confuse me. What you’re describing is not the distribution, but a vanilla GNOME experience. That can be achieved on basically any distribution with a healthy package repository. Not to mention that troubleshooting rarely involves the package manager, unless you are aware of a package that specifically breaks something. The recent pixman regression would be an example of this

bigmclargehuge,
@bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world avatar

I mean, a portion of my experience is switching to Gnome, yes. I also touch on multiple other aspects that are different from my regular system on a deeper level (package manager, release system, package version, etc).

cucumber_sandwich,

In arch it’s just very easy to forget to install a specificoptional package for a subsystem that makes a feature of gnome work.

some_guy,

This is the sort of thing that I enjoy seeing on a Saturday morning. Congrats!

egerlach,

This is interesting because I’ve been thinking about switching from Debian to Arch. I’m already running Nix inside of my Debian installation to get more recent apps (I don’t like how snap interacts with the rest of the system, so I avoid it if I can).

Is there anything else on a more base OS level (like apt v pacman) that you’ve noticed is different, if you’re willing to share?

bigmclargehuge,
@bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world avatar

Welp, I’ve only been at it a few days, plus I’m kind of treating this system as plug and play. Meaning, on my desktop I’m happy to get my fingers into all types of config files and such, while on this laptop I intend to leave as many things default as possible. Bottom line is I haven’t looked too deep under the hood, so I can’t give too much insight on how the inner workings compare. I fully recommend giving Arch a try though. Just take things slowly and read the ArchWiki carefully.

thinman,
@thinman@lemmy.ml avatar

I have a spare laptop that I use to play with different Linux distros and BSDs, but everything I rely on runs Debian, work and home.

bigmclargehuge,
@bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world avatar

I can see why. Really liking how everything feels so far. I might also use this laptop to try a flavour of BSD at some point

dallen,

Same! Debian with gnome on my desktop and work laptop. Raspbian on my Pi4. Headless Debian in the cloud…

mariusafa,

You can use backports too!

possiblylinux127,

You also could give Fedora a try

Codilingus,

I second this, but atomic/silverblue.

possiblylinux127,

Atomic and Silverblue are not for the faint of heart

bigmclargehuge,
@bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world avatar

I enjoy a challenge. I did briefly look at Fedora but picked Debian because of the history mainly (plus I at least had cursory experience with apt).

possiblylinux127,

dnf can be thought of as the fact version of apt. It has better checks to make sure you don’t break anything and it keeps a history so you can roll back changes

words_number,

I can recommend debian testing. I’m using it on laptop and desktop for several years, always running “apt update && apt full-upgrade && apt --purge autoremove” and it never broke. It’s not officially a “rolling release” but practically it is.

EntropyPure,

If you want to take a step in between: I am running Debian Testing on my notebook. Testing is the staging ground for the next major Debian Version, right now 13.

Still very much stable, but inherently more up to date packages. Not a real rolling release, but the closest you can get to a rolling Debian. Plenty of updates, but no problems in the past year I used it.

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