Linux Mint to Debian
I wrestled with this decision for a long time. Linux mint was working fine, meeting all of my needs, and I would totally recommend it for a beginner. It worked pretty much out of the box, and the installer was clear and easy to understand. However, there was something that was pulling me towards debian that I just couldn’t shake. So, when I had a free Sunday morning I thought “why not go for a learning opportunity and try it out”. I have backups of both my home directory and system backups from my linux setups, so the worst that could happen is I have to reinstall mint again and restore from backup.
The Debian installer
A point that I kept hearing from debian 12 reviews was that the installer was quite bad compared to other distributions. As I write this, I am just passing the disk partition stage, and I don’t think it’s that terrible from a usability perspective. It lists out recommended inputs for people that may not be sure, and allows you to go back to previous stages in the process. One hurdle that came with the net installer is that it didn’t have the drivers for my wireless adapter by default, and so I had to resort to tethering internet through my pixel 8 to get it to have network access. If I didn’t have a phone with this capability, things may have gotten tricky.
Writing a partition using an encrypted LMS took a long time, because debian wrote over the previous disk using random data. A good thing from a security standpoint, but also a pain point to watch out for.
Choosing a desktop environment
With mint, I had been on cinnamon but wanted to take this opportunity to try out KDE plasma. This created much more headache than switching the underlying distro, as I had to learn how to do many things over again, such as customizing shortcuts and running into interesting graphical bugs. Out of the gate, rofi has an error where it doesn’t accept keyboard input immediately upon launch, and the logo for alacritty is replaced with a yellow “W” (which I am guessing is something to do with Wayland?).
I am excited to explore KDE more, and some things are impressive. I love how the full screen mode gets rid of everything, including the top bar of the application. I also think that window switching is a lot cleaner with alt-tab. Escape to caps-lock was supported as one of the pre-defined options. Also, set spell in neovim now has a much nicer coloured red squiggly underline! Not even sure what caused this but I love it.
Reflections on the overall time commitment
Overall, it has taken me about 6 hours to go from removing linux mint, to getting a functional debian setup up and running. About an hour of that time was debian writing over the old disk as mentioned earlier. It was a lot less time than I was expecting, and also not as hard as it was made out to be by some. Yes, debian was not as easy as mint and cinnamon, which practically ran itself, but it is doable if you are comfortable looking some things up online. If I was to recommend a strategy to others, I would say to start with linux mint, and learn about how you may like things. Then, in 6-12 months, give debian a go and install things based on that experience. I was now much more concious of where I installed things from, and trying to keep the total number of package sources to a minimum.
What went well
Thank goodness for stow! Moving over my configurations was super easy, especially because there were no existing configurations to worry about overwriting. Most command line tools, such as eza, and zoxide were a piece of cake once rust was installed. Debian feels incredibly snappy, and I will be keeping things lightweight and intentional this time around.
What could have gone better
The process of using sudo out of the gate was slightly confusing, as the installation was setup with a root user and then my main user as a non-root. For someone new to linux they would likely have just been frustrated when they couldn’t follow the instructions for what they were trying to install. Keychain has presented some issues, though otherwise ssh keys are working as expected.
The stability of debian
One of the biggest cons lobbed at debian is that the software gets outdated for desktop usage. I thought about this for a while before embarking on the switch, and how many different programs I actually need on my computer. I need:
- A browser (firefox)
- A texteditor (neovim)
- A terminal (alacritty)
- An email client (thunderbird)
That’s about it! As long as those four things are supported, I am a happy camper. I don’t need new non-security updates, and this switch is a moment for me to live that. There is a joy in taking the time to master particular tools without feeling like they are inadequate. If they work today, they will likely work just fine in the years time. Technology doesn’t have to move fast to be good.