Debian 12: Milestone Linux Distro

foreign [Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers.com this time we're going to look at the latest version of the Debian Linux distro in addition to being a popular distro in its own right Debian is also the base for many other distros so for example MX Linux deep in raspberry pios and Ubuntu all based on Debian and in turn zorinos and Linux Mint are based on Ubuntu although there's also a direct Debian edition of Linux Mint and all of this means to the release of a new version of Debian is an important milestone for the Linux community so let's go and take a closer look so it's June 10th 2023 and Debian 12 has just been released like previous editions it's named after a character from Toy Story and specifically after a little green worm that likes books it's great to see that Debian 12 will be supported for five years and if we scroll on down we find there's official support for nine architectures including 64-bit and 32-bit x86 and arm CPUs if with very old 32-bit x86 systems no longer supported to get Debian 12 let's go to the home page and then here we will scroll on down to a download like that where immediately we're presented with a link for a 64-bit ISO for installing Debian 12 on a standard XXX computer with an internet connection however for other versions including live images that can be tried before installation we can scroll on down here and click on getting Debian and here we have lots and lots of options for start we can find a 32-bit version of a network installer we can find cloud images for using Debian 12 on platforms like Amazon web services we can find down here complete installation images that allow installation without a network connection there are links for buying Optical media and finally there are the live images I just mentioned so for example if we click down here we find tolerance for a number of different 64-bit versions of Debian 12 and they differ by having different graphical desktops available cinnamon gnome KDE plasma Etc or we can download a version without a desktop however what I'm going to do is to go back to the main download page where I'm going to grab a copy of the 64-bit Network installer this we're going to use to install Debian 12 on my I5 test rig and will be given the option during installation to select our desktop environment and there we are the file has downloaded so let's now use bologna etcher to write the iso image to a bootable USB drive so we're now booting up for my USB drive and as this is not a live image we'll go straight into the installer as you can see and I do understand the install of a Debian 12 has been updated so let's select graphical install like that and I'll Now set my language as English and my location will be United Kingdom as will be my keyboard layout and it's now detecting Hardware and now we need to set a hostname for the system we'll use a default of Debian and the domain name ending is completely irrelevant for my home setup but I'll just use com to keep it happy next it wants us to set a root password but I'm actually going to leave this blank because as it explains here if we do leave it blank it means I can use the sudo command to execute root commands from the initial user account so here I'm going to click on continue and then I have to set up the initial user account the name here will be EC as I always put in that will give you a username lowercase EC and then I have to set a password and it's now time to set up the disk I'm going to use the entire disk here for installing the operating system this is going to be a test install I've just got one empty SSD connected to my I5 test rig right now we can see it there this 120 gigabyte Kingston SSD that is our USB drive below it so this drive selected okay we'll click on continue and after that I'm going to select use all files in one partition that will be fine and then here we can just check what's going on this seems to be okay so we'll click continue again it'll probably check again it has is it all right it is we'll click yes and continue and as we can see the base system is now being installed next we have to configure the package manager I'm going to leave the main mirror there on UK which for me is fine and for the archive mirror we'll stay on deb.debian.org next I don't need to enter a proxy so I'll just leave this blank and we're now asked if we want to supply Anonymous information to help the developers things like that so I think that I'm going to click yes and guess what continue so we're now at the exciting part where we pick our desktop environment the default here is gnome I'm going to stick with that for now although we'll look at some other desktops later in the video but for now I can just click on continue and there we are our desktop and other software is now being downloaded and installed and there we go installation is now complete so we can now click on continue to reboot the system and here we are booting into Debian 12 so I'll just log in there we go looks like everything is working we're welcome to Debian 12. and there's probably a few extra things to do here let's click next on that and our keyboard seems to be set up okay we'll click on that but I'll now turn off location services because why should the computer know where I am I'm obviously going to skip connecting online accounts never ever do that and there we are we're all done we can start using our new operating system this said I'm now going to make a few scaling changes so things read better on video and I'll come back to you after that so just what's been updated in this latest version of Debian well for start we have this lovely new artwork by artist Juliet Tarka and on a more technical level Debian 12 is based on Linux kernel 6.1 more broadly a key update in Debian 12 is that the official ISO images the installation images now include non-free firmware or in other words proprietary code for controlling certain Hardware components and in my view this is a massive Leap Forward as it means things like Wi-Fi adapters are far more likely to work Straight Out of the Box and indeed if we go to activities here and go to software and we go across to the software and updates we can see we have a new non-free and firmware repository and a repository if you're not aware it's just where Linux downloads software from and as we can see the non-free firmware repository is activated by default and we can also see that in addition there are two other repositories for software let's say either non-free or which depend on non-free software and if you're wondering non-dfsg refers to software that doesn't conform to the Debian free software guidelines and this doesn't mean software which has to be paid for it's just a non-dfsg software is not entirely free in the fullest open source meeting of the term anyway without getting too heavily into the philosophy I would strongly recommend turning on these two repositories all at once my password of course to do it there we go and we'll turn that one on as well and then when we hit close It'll ask us to reload the repository index which is perfectly reasonable it wants to know what's gone on it'll just do that and this means that the software manager will be able to make use of those non-free software repositories in the future and indeed even with some non-free firmware now included a bit of manual setup is going to be required here in Debian 12 by some users and we'll look at that in the next segment of the video but before that let's take a look at what end user software is pre-installed let's just have a quick look we can see down here we've got for example a Firefox browser this is actually Firefox ESR the extended support release which you might want to replace with a version that's updated a bit more regularly that's entirely up to you and also down here we've got LibreOffice writer it's hardly a surprise deeper offices install but uh there it is it'll come up as well that works shall we write hello we always have to write hello don't we in these videos If we don't we're breaking the law let's make a low very large indeed yes there it is we can use clearly LibreOffice writer do we want to save this no we don't and just to show you what else is pre-installed here we've also got things like the standard file manager that works perfectly well nothing particularly exciting really to report on here if we look into all the software lots of things are there solitaire's there that's always good to see although I'll resist the temptation to play it and the other things here give us a reasonable range of Linux applications talking of Linux the default desktop here is gnome we saw it was the default in the installer and this is specifically for Gnome 43 and as you'll know if you've seen some of my other Linux distro reviews this is not shall we say my favorite desktop environment but everything here does work as its designers intended and it is worth noting if we go back to all the software and we go to utilities they have included a little tweaks application here which allows us to make a few changes which is what I use to perform a bit of font scaling earlier in the video we saw the latest Debian installer doing its stuff and while some non-free firmware is now included the installer still lacks the option to install a proprietary driver for an Nvidia graphics card so if you just installed Debian 12 and you've got an Nvidia GPU like you have on this system here this really needs taken care of and do note that the best AMD or Intel GPU drivers will be automatically installed however we do here as I just said need the Nvidia driver to make sure we can use things like 3D modeling packages or games or video editors to their full potential and to install this driver unlike in other distros we are forced to go to the terminal so let's bring up the terminal like that and I'd note this will only work if you've enabled the non-free repositories like we did in that segment of the video but assuming you've done that we can enter sudo app to install Nvidia driver and it'll of course ask for our password and there we go we now press y to continue and it will install the Nvidia driver and there we are it's done it although it now tells us as a conflict with the free driver currently installed that's hardly a surprise and we can get around this by rebooting the machine as it sets so we'll do okay like that and there we are we should now reboot our system and here we are back again and if we do a search for NVIDIA like that we see we have a Nvidia settings so the driver does seem to have been installed okay this said I do think it's a shame that in the 2023 distro we had to install it using the terminal and this kind of thing perhaps explains why quite a lot of people run a desktop distro based on Debian rather than Debian itself as we've seen Debian 12 offers many choices of desktop environment and I've now done a clean install selecting KDE plasma specifically this is plasma 5.27 which was released in February 2023 and is the latest version of this very stylish and highly customizable desktop so let's log in here we are and this is not my first boot I have been customizing things here quite a bit which is very easy to do in KDA plasma and this is certainly now a desktop environment I'd be very happy to use as my daily driver although one thing that's interesting to me is that I did this clean installed using exactly the same USB drive we created earlier with the only difference in the installation being the choice of the desktop however if we go back to the menu here and we go to Graphics we see that the gnu image manipulation program is pre-installed and it wasn't pre-installed earlier when we selected The Gnome desktop environment and this is just a little curious it doesn't matter but I didn't expect to get different pre-installed software by selecting a different desktop environment anyway whilst plasma 5.27 is excellent there are still many other options and if you want to install an additional desktop it's really easy to do you don't have to do a clean install you can just go back to system and go to the terminal here called console and enter the command sudo task cell like that and if we press OK we can now select different desktop environments they're all listed here so for example we could select lxde just press the spacebar to select like that and lxde is a good choice on a less powerful system and in this context it's worth noting that a Debian 12 system with a graphical desktop can be run on any computer with a dual core processor and two gigabytes of RAM anyway let's actually have a look at lxde so I'll tab down to ok and if we now we start the system here we are back on the login screen and how you switch to a different desktop environment depends on the one you're currently running there's often a little gear down here and on the right which you can select but here because we're currently still in KDE plasma we go down bottom left and we can select a different desktop there we can select lxde so if we now log in here we are running an lxde desktop in Debian 12 which I personally would scale more like this however the final desktop I want to try out is cinnamon so if we do this here we are running W12 with a cinnamon desktop and I feel very much at home here because the cinnamon desktop was created by and for Linux Mint so if I was going to switch to Debian cinnamon is probably the desktop but I would choose Debian 12 is an important release for two reasons firstly as already noted Debian is the base for many other distros and secondly unlike windows and many other distros Debian 12 has been released with a 32-bit Edition and this means that older computers with a 32-bit processor will be able to go on running a modern fully patched operating system for the next five years and I think that's very important indeed but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed but you've seen here please press that like button if you haven't subscribed Please Subscribe and I hope to talk to you again very soon [Music]

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 205,404

Keywords: Debian, Debian Linux, latest Debian, Debian 12, Bookworm, Debian Bookworm, Debian book worm, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, Debian 12 review, Debian 12 tutorial, Debian 12 installation, Debian NVIDIA, Debian 12 NVIDIA

Id: YRaJa-VjLGE

Length: 17min 4sec (1024 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 18 2023