I Used Debian 12 For 5 Months - Long Term Review

[Music] so way back in May I put out a video talking about how the next long-term review that I was going to do was Debian 12. now my original plan for that was to use Debian 11 which was the primary release of that time period and then upgraded 12 which was soon to come out that didn't actually end up happening because of some firmware issues but the point is is that I actually installed Debian 12 at that point I've been using it for the last five months on my secondary hard drive on the computer that sits in front of me and on my main laptop which goes with me everywhere I go and also runs my standing desk these days this is the long term review of Debian 12 Bookworm and I have some thoughts and most of them are actually overwhelmingly positive spoiler alert Debian is a pretty good distro it's been around for a little while it's fairly established it has a lot of software so if you don't want to watch to the next 30 minutes of me rambling about Debbie 12 spoiler alert it's a good distribution but if you want to get into the details first hit the like button because it really helps the channel let's go ahead and jump in so the first thing we want to talk about is the installation process now I'm not going to go into any details about how horrible the website is we could talk about that until I go blue in the face in fact I've made at least two videos regarding that so we won't talk about it here but if you go to the website debian.org and you download the the regular standard ISO the one that they link to right on the the front page you're going to get the net install so this is going to lead you to an installer that is it's not the most modern of installers out there I will just put that out there it's not very modern it's not the calamares or the the Ubuntu installer or even the open Souza installer I feel is more modern than this one here this one is an old installer it looks like it's something that Debian would do right it's not a very modern seller but if you're not hung up on what it looks like the process is fairly easy and fairly standard and fairly easy to go through and the biggest issue I have with install dollar is twofold first off if you have slow internet the net install is probably not where you're going to want to go because it is pretty slow even if you choose the appropriate mirrors it can be pretty slow because it's going to be downloading quite a bit of data to your hard drive in order to get your system set up so if you have a slow internet access or if you're you're catching your ISP on a bad day you may want to look into another ISO the second thing that I want to talk about just a little bit and when it comes to installation is because Debian does have other installers here so even if you just use this one ISO there are two different installers at least on this ISO so you have the standard installation which I'm showing in the b-roll and you have the expert installation which you'll probably want to use if you're going to set up something like butterfs or xfs or ZFS if you want to use an alternative file system that requires you to create custom Mount points and all this stuff you'll have to use the expert installer which is even more old-fashioned than the traditional Debian installer because it uses an end cursors install systems so my biggest problem with the Debian install is that they don't modernize this just a little bit so I would prefer them to use a calamarase installer and the funny thing is that they do do this they have isos they have a live environment on them that use the calamari's installer they maintain these for every single release and they're there you'll have to find them because their website is again very you know not good but if you do find them those things are available if they were to make one of those the main installation or the main ISO I should say their install process would be very very good now I'm not saying that the installation process is bad it just feels just a tad outdated and it makes choosing a different file system just a little bit harder than it needs to be especially if you want to be in control of your sub volumes in butterfs for example you'll have to do that manually there's nothing automatic about that so that's the installation overall not a bad installation definitely not the worst installation of any kind I just put that out there but it's not my favorite so once you get past the installation let's talk about the out of the box experience so Debian is a distribution that does not have a default desktop environment so if you want to use gnome you can use gnome if you want to use KDE you can use KDE if you want to use xfce you can use xfce if you want to use lxde I'm sure you're pretty sure you can use it maybe they've switched lxq not actually sure but you have an option during install of approximately six or seven different desktop environments maybe it's four or five you you have a plethora of different options there for desktop environment none of them are going to be the default one right so they do have a Debian desktop environment that is selected by default I'm not actually sure what you get if you select that I've never actually tried but they give you an option during install of what desktop environment you want to use now I would love if they actually had a window manager as an option I'm pretty sure that they don't it's I'm pretty sure they're all desktop environments I'm going off memory here and it might it'll probably show in the b-roll and I'm not actually watching the b-roll as it goes on but the point is is that they offer you some selection of what desktop environment to use and you can choose whatever you want once you get into those desktop environments or with whatever one you choose I should say it's going to be very very very stock experience so if you choose gnome you're going to get basically as The Gnome guys want you to have it you get that's what you get same thing with KDE you're going to get a very stock version of KDE same thing with xfc so in the b-roll that you're saying now I chose xfc and as you can tell xfce looks like vanilla xfc and if we want to go on a rant for just a minute we can all talk about how xfc really needs to update their their default settings and their default layout and stuff make it actually look like it came from this Century but that's beside the point if you're gonna whatever desktop environment you're going to choose you're going to get the vanilla version of that desktop environment in terms of pre-installed software you're not going to get very much you're going to get LibreOffice you're going to get things to play videos and music that's basically it you're not going to get a lot of a ton of bloat here so despite the fact that even though if you if you look at the neofetch which should appear in the b-roll somewhere along the line here you're going to see you're going to have around 1300 to 1400 packages even though that's true you're not going to get a lot of actually pre-installed software in the iso that you download and install and I think that that's good and the reason why that and I should just talk a minute about why that package count is so high that's just the way Debian does things it wait it's The Way Debian counts packages I've made a video about this in the past I'll link that in the video description as well if I remember basically Debian just counts packages and packages and bundles packages differently than all the rest of the distros that's why your package account is going to be much higher than say if you were to install Arch which usually runs around six or seven hundred out of the box during a fresh install so it's a little bit different that's the reason package account is so high even though the amount of pre-installed software is fairly low like I said just offices the office suite and some stuff for playing videos and stuff like that that's basically all you get so let's go ahead and move on to package management package management is fairly standard on Debbie and if you've ever used Ubuntu before you're going to have used debian's package manager apt is the package manager of Debian it's also the package manager of every Ubuntu based distro every Debian based distro so if you've been using Linux for any amount of time chances are you've used apt even if you haven't ever used Debian before apt is a very easy to use package manager it's just sudo app install whatever or apt search whatever if you want to search for something app remove if you want to remove something so the syntax is very easy and it's a fairly fast package manager as well so if you want to install a whole bunch of updates it's going to go through those pretty fat fast and it's just a very good package manager now that being said I immediately and you'll probably see this in the b-roll I immediately at install Nala because Nala is just better I think it's faster a little bit I also think that it's prettier and has better output and all that stuff so uh very aesthetically pleasing I prefer Nala but Nala's basically just a front end for apps so still using the same package management stuff that you would see if you're just going to use apt it's just in a different package so I prefer Nala again just basically app front-end so that's package management there's not much to talk about apt has been around for literally ever so there's nothing new for me to say it's a good package manager it's not my favorite package manager but also it's just a really solid one right I prefer Pac-Man Pac-Man's probably my favorite package manager even though I'm not using Arch as a main daily driver these days Pac-Man is basically my favorite but app is is a close second probably it works better I think it's faster than dnf it's definitely faster than zipper which is what my main my main District uses so it's actually pretty good so that's the package management situation on Debian now in terms of sources and repositories we're going to talk about stable versus unstable here in a little while but we're going to talk about software availability first uh and the reason why I've put it in this order simply because it's just usually the way that I do it so software availability on Debian is actually very very very good and that kind of surprised me a little bit because I went into the review expecting to have to use flat pack a lot I expected to have to use distro box a lot in order to get the packages that I need things like rophie things like and usually here's the thing no matter what distribution that I'm using usually the main stuff is going to be there and that's going to be true for most everybody right so if you want OBS OBS is going to be there if you want Firefox or audacity or LibreOffice or an email client or Spotify or Discord or whatever chances are those are going to be in the repository somewhere along the line the more proprietary aspect of some of those applications probably preclude it from some distributions but but the vast majority of Mainline applications that you need if you're a Linux user are going to be in most repositories so I never have a a fear when it comes to repositories when I'm looking for those main applications is when I get into the more esoteric stuff that I have sometimes issues with some distributions things like rophie things like polybar things like certain window managers that I want to run I have I have had issues in the past and debians actually was fairly good now I did have some issues so for example a q tile is not on the repositories and Q tile is my favorite Window Manager I wanted to use Q tile on my machine and I could not get it to run now since then with some helps from my fellow Linux YouTubers I've managed to get Q tile installed I actually didn't spend very much time in Qatar on Debbie and I actually ended up using plasma but I did get it installed and that the reason why that was such a pain in the rear end because I had to build it from source and the the PIP stuff has been blocked because of security reasons so you have to use pipex or you have to force things and force breakages and all that stuff it was a mess not necessarily something that I need to talk about in this video it has literally little to do with Debian more to do with the fact that python is a is not well supported anymore when it comes to installing packages because of security issues like pip used to be the thing that you would install things with and now it's being blocked by most distributions it's it's a weird situation but that's beside the point so cute tile was really the biggest absence when it comes to software availability all the minor tools that I need in order to get a desktop or a window manager actually up and running things like rophie things like polybar and other like bspw ID polybar bspwm was there I3 was there so if you if you're looking for those esoteric tools that you'd use probably in a window manager situation or in other situations it's actually a fairly deep repository of software and that was pretty good no I I there were situations where I did have to dip into flat packs so I wanted the most recent version of OBS so I installed the flat pack version of OBS and one of the most recent version of audacity same thing there I I went with the flat pack there was only one time when I wanted to download something that didn't have a flat pack and that was Vivaldi and I had to use distro box with an arch install to get Vivaldi and I've actually had to do that in openstud as well so that's not that big a deal it's just kind of the way things go there but there is a dead package of Vivaldi but I think it actually work so I ended up using the distro Box in order to get it there so for the most part software availability is very very good on Debian I was very surprised now and where we run into a Sticky Wicket if you will is when it comes to versions of those software so if you are and we've talked about this obviously many times before if you're of the persuade equation that you need the most up-to-date software debian's not going to be for you even if you run the unstable Branch you're going to be behind the arch guys or the Gen 2 guys or even open Souza right you're going to want to use a different distro that's something that is much more rolling than Debian will ever be and that's just the truth of the matter if you don't give a rats you know behind about what version of software that you use then stable is fantastic and it's what you you know it's just a very good you know way of getting your software and you don't have to worry about it it's just going to be there and we'll talk more about stable versus unstable here in a minute when I get there but needless to say this the software availability is Broad but you're going to have to keep in mind that versioning of stuff if that at all matters to you so the next thing we'll talk about is updating and upgrading here's the thing guys Debian doesn't get a lot of updates so my friend Jake Atlantic he's a fellow Linux YouTuber he just did a a video talking about his channel and in that video he talked about how Debian was boring and that's absolutely 100 percent true specifically when it comes to updating like if you're in the habit like let's just say you're a long time art user and you're in the habit of updating your system either every day or every two or three days or whatever it is like you you update every few days and you're in that habit and then you switch to Debian and you run an update every four days you are going to be very very bored of that over a course of time because chances are you're not going to see updates every four days I think that in the five months that I used stable on the secondary hard drive on my machine here I probably saw four or five updates period not like four or five packages to update I've had more than that but about four times during that five month period I actually updated and found updates waiting for me one of those was when Debbie 12.1 came out that was like the biggest update other times you know there might be two or three packages there that was it and that happened like four or five times that was it the vast majority of times you'll see you'll see in the b-roll me trying to update my system it'll say no packages update that's what you get when you're unstable it's just the way that it works and this is not a problem I'm not complaining about this if you are someone who wants an absolutely stable Rock Solid distribution and we'll talk more about this in the conclusion obviously stay stable Debian is for another lack for lack of a better word it's stable you're not going to get a ton of updates here and that's by Design so yes it's boring but that's what it's supposed to do now if you are on the unstable Branch you're going to get a lot more updates so you'll want to update your system more often now I did not run unstable on either my laptop or this one for very long I preferred the stable Ranch just simply because it feels like that's the branch that most people are going to want to use if they want to use Debian where stable really shines or where I should say where Debian really shines is the ability to pin certain applications to the unstable Branch so you can be on stable you can have all of your applications from the stable branch of Debian which means you're going to experience a very boring but stable system but if there are certain applications that you need to be more up to date you can pin those applications to stable or excuse me you can pin those applications to unstable which means you get the more written versions with without having to completely switch to unstable now when I did run unstable on my machines I just went the whole hog I just completely switched to the unstable branch and you know the switch between stable and unstable was really really easy it was just a matter of changing the sources.list which you'll see in the b-roll and it worked very very good I didn't have any problems whatsoever in fact I would say that the unstable version of Debian is just as stable as the stable version I didn't use it long enough to say for sure if that statement is 100 absolutely long term accurate or not so don't take any of my word there but I will say that the little bit of time that I did run unstable it wasn't unstable at all they don't call it by the way they don't call it unstable they call it testing so I I've been using the word unstable that's not the right word so I I know that I've been calling it the wrong thing for the vast majority of the video it's testing or I believe they call it Trixie now is is the code name for for uh the the testing Branch so it's testing not unstable so I apologize for calling it the wrong thing I probably will call it I have it in my notes as unstable so that's probably why I've been doing it for the whole time so that's just the way that is so anyways stable versus unstable if I were to offer recommendations for which branch you want to be on I would say go with the stable version and then if there are certain applications you need to be more up to date pin those to the testing Branch so that you get those updates and you can just kind of stick around with everything else being in the stable Branch it just makes the most sense to me you kind of get the best of both worlds you get the super altar reliability of Debian stable and you get the updates of the applications you absolutely have to have the most recent versions of so that's the way that I would go if I were to run Debian long term okay so that takes care of the whole application software availability all that kind of section there now we're going to move into some more Nitty Gritty details so let's talk about Bluetooth so and I'll talk more about this I think later I always mention it but Bluetooth was a pain in the rear end for me when it comes to specifically wireless controllers so I have been gaming quite a bit more often or at least I did during the period of time I was testing Debian and we'll talk about gaming more here in a minute but the point is is that I tried to connect my Bluetooth controller many many times and every single time it completely failed now I've tried multiple different ways of doing this I've been I chose the KDE version of Debian when I installed it on both of my machines so I was in the KDE settings to connect the Bluetooth and that failed so I downloaded blue man in order to get a direct connection to my device and that too failed I also used the the CLI utility of blue man to try to connect and that too fails I don't know what the problem was I don't know if it's my specific controller or if it's something that is going wrong with Debian I haven't been able to confirm anybody else having this problem so it just might be me but when it comes to at least wireless controllers I did not have success there when it comes to actually using it now when it comes to Bluetooth headphones they work fine or as as fine as they ever do when it comes to using Bluetooth headphones on Linux you still have to be very careful with what profile they're using so if if they're set to the whole handset mode or whatever you're gonna hear make really horrible quality or whatever so you have to choose day 2dp profile or whatever it is and you want to make sure you're on the right one and in traditional pipe wire fashion it never remembers what you sweat you just select so every time you select you connect your Bluetooth headphones it's going to be a different profile it'll switch back and forth so you always have to open up the settings go to the profile that you want to actually have and it's a pain that's now that is a pipeware problem not a Debian problem that has an that happens on every single distribution that's not a big deal the the Bluetooth connection of the the wireless controller is definitely a Debian issue at least for me because I was able to get that controller to work on both open Souza Fedora and Endeavor OS I believe I've those are the three distributions that I've tried gaming on in the past five months and it worked on all three of those so that's definitely definitely a Debian problem so that's Bluetooth uh when it comes to network sharing and I apologize for network sharing I don't have any b-roll for network sharing I tried Samba and in traditional fashion Samba did not work very well on Debian out of the box I had to do some very weird finagling in order to get it to actually work it did eventually work and it worked the best on Debbie and Debian so on this main machine and on my laptop it shared them fairly easily now I had to set it all up I had to install the things and everything I had to make sure the services are running in traditional Samba fashion I did get those things to work so it shared Debian to Debbie could not get into sharing from Debbie and open Souza now I don't know if that was an open Susa problem or if it was a Debian problem my guess is that it's a Samba problem because Samba is under garbage that's just my opinion and I I still think that I'm quite right about that but the point is is that Samba was hit or miss when it comes to actual sharing SSH was perfectly fine worked on this was able to SSH into both VMS and to other machines it worked just fine I had literally no issues it just I was just able to bring over my SSH keys that I always use and open uh open SSH was automatically already installed and it just worked so SSH was a good one and it does have SCP already installed as well so file sharing with SCP also worked just fine okay so let's go ahead then and talk about gaming and my experience with gaming is mostly positive outside of the controller situation so yes I could not get my controller to work but I was able to game fairly well so Steam from the Debian repository installs just like you'd expect it to it's of course not the most recent version of steam so you're gonna have some you know issues there but if you have a problem with that of course you can always uninstall the steam from the repositories and install the flat pack you'll get a more recent version I've been using the steam from the repositories this entire time I haven't had any problems uh the games that you're going to be looking at are our city skylines and Red Dead Redemption and hearthstones Hearthstone is not from Steam it's being run through a bottle so that's a little bit different uh both of them are all three of those games work really really well I don't do benchmarks on this channel mainly because I think that they're fairly useless because my Hardware is going to run and you have a different Benchmark than all of your guys's Hardware so how are you supposed to get anything useful out of that just know that steam worked very very well I didn't notice any hiccups City skylines crashed a few times but that's just the way City Skylands is it doesn't work 100 positively on any Linux distribution that I've ever experienced and it was no worse on Debian than it was on open Souza or Fedora or Arch or red core or any of those distributions that I've tried before this it worked about the same in terms of frame rate I didn't really test it to my eyes but you can't tell the difference between 60 and 90. it worked it looked pretty fine to me and same thing with Red Dead Redemption it worked again it just it was it was a very good experience I played it for I don't know probably a few hours here and there I'm not a big gamer so take my gaming experience and kind of multiply that by how much you put weight onto my opinions but it worked fairly well in terms of steam I did spend a lot of time playing Hearthstone on the Debian because I cannot get Hearthstone to work on open Souza so anytime I wanted to play Hearthstone and I didn't want to pull up the iPad I would come over to my Debian install and I'd play it here on Debian and it worked actually it worked better than I I would expect mainly because usually when I install the bottles I have to recreate the bottle every time I want to play it this time I didn't have to do that I just launched it it launched into the Battle.net it allowed me to actually you know launch into Hearthstone and I would play it for hours and hours on end and I'd be a very very happy person because I love Hearthstone and I wish I could get it to work on open Souza but unfortunately I can't so Debian was kind of my savior there it worked fairly well so let's go ahead then and talk about stability because this is if there's one Shining Light One Shining reason why you want to use Debbie and it's because of the stability and man when they say Debbie and is stable they ain't lying guys Debian is super freaking stable I haven't had zero problems when it comes to stability on Debian and that was when I was running the unstable branch and when I was running stable they both seemed equally stable for me I spent most of my time as I said earlier unstable so I have the most experience with that it just is a very stable distribution zero issues and part of that of course is that there are no updates like of course it's stable when nothing changes right if it works after install and you don't get very many updates throughout the course of five months it's probably going to be stable for those entire five months it's just kind of the math of it right whereas with Arch the reason why Arch is unstable isn't because Arch as a base is unstable Arch is unstable or you know quote unquote unstable you know I mean yeah it's it's less or it's more likely to be unstable I should say because it gets so many updates because you get you have the most up-to-date versions of software and when that happens you aren't getting the most tested software you're getting the most up-to-date that has more likely to have bugs and that's when things break on on Debian that's not the situation you're obviously getting a very controlled version of the software that's offered to you in the repository and all that stuff is super super tested in order to make it into the stable branch and that means that the entire system is just freaking stable if you want a distribution that never breaks Debian is probably going to be the best option for you now I'm not saying that Debian can't be broken that's not what I'm saying it definitely can be broken I would say that the vast majority of people who have problems with Debian are in three different categories those who can't get it to install it all because of Hardware problems that happens on every distribution chances are you've probably encountered some distro along the line that you can install because it doesn't like your Hardware that's one group of the Debian failures that I should say not that they're the failures but the people who fail at using Debian that's one category of them another one and this is probably the biggest one and the people who don't like Debian because of the boringness of it so those people would hop away and then the third one when it comes to technical problems are the people who Tinker quite a bit and who break their systems because of that tinkering so if you're on Debian and you're doing weird things don't be surprised when things break because just because Debian is stable doesn't mean that it can't be broken it can in fact be broken you can do things that you're not supposed to do and find out that your system no longer boots or whatever so usually those are the three areas where where I've seen the people kind of just kind of come to a roadblock when it comes to Debian for everybody else or at least for the most most everybody else Debian is the kind of distribution that you put on a laptop and you don't want to have to do any maintenance so if you are someone who really really wants to get say your mom or your grandma or your cousins or any of your family members on to Linux which and you know going in that you're going to have to be the tech support for those people Debian is a fantastic option for that situation because you don't have to worry about having to go over there every few days to do an update so if you put Arch on there you know you can't wait a month or two to go do those updates because you know the person who has the computer isn't going to do them if you have Debian on there you could go months without doing an update and be perfectly fine there is a point using Debian here over the course of the last five months where I went a whole month without any updates at all like zero updates that's nuts right so if if you're looking for a situation if you're in a situation where you have a piece of Hardware that you don't want to maintain you just want to put something on there that you know works and you can then send that out into the world for it to be used Debian is a fantastic option because it is super super stable obviously I I think that that's probably the primary reason why you want to use Debian it's definitely the reason why I would want to use Debian if I were to want to use Debian going forth from now and we'll talk about whether or not I'm going to use Debian on my system at the end of the video so let's go ahead then and move on to some of the problems that I did have so and I I will put a Proviso out there that quite a few of these are either Hardware related for my Hardware or are not Debian problems at all so I'm just going to put those out there and I have three of them the first one and this is more likely to be a Debian problem than uh than not but I I will at least put it out there that it could be a hardware problem on my end so and that is that I've had some horrible startup times on Debian like on especially on this machine here in front of me on my main machine that's running Debian on the secondary hard drive booting up sometimes takes two minutes to actually get to the login screen two minutes at least sometimes it's longer than that I don't know what actually is going on I've looked at some of the error codes they don't make much sense and there's no response when it comes to Googling it so I'm not sure what's going on there one thing I didn't do is hop into the forums and actually ask the question which I should have done but it's actually only happened started happening in the last like month and a half so somewhere along line something changed either from an update or I'd see nothing has changed in my Hardware in that time so I'm not sure actually what's going on all I know is in the last month and a half or two months or so the startup times on this main machine here have been bad like downright bad on my laptop uh not great still but also not nearly as bad as the main machine so Debian has pretty slow startup times just kind of like by default it feels like to me it's definitely not as fast as some other distributions that I've tried and apparently in some situations it can be worse even than that so that's probably the worst one other than the Bluetooth that I talked about earlier where I couldn't get my Bluetooth controller to work at all so that that was just something that I already mentioned uh the other two problems that I've had are problems that aren't necessarily Debian problems I should say they are more problems with the things themselves so I chose KDE as my primary a desktop environment on both my main machine and on my laptop I usually do that because KDE is the if I'm going to be having to use a desktop environment I prefer KDE over genome it's just the fact of the matter right so I always install KDE and traditional KD fashion KDE is a buggy piece of you know what honestly it hasn't been that bad okay it's I've had way way worse because Debian does use the LTS version of of plasma it's been mostly okay but it has the traditional problems that KD has specifically when multi-monitors are in play so I always wake up my monitors and for whatever reason my panel switches to a different monitor it doesn't always switch to the same monitor sometimes it remembers where it's supposed to go sometimes it doesn't why it can't do that all the time don't know uh and it's specifically worse when you have two monitors that aren't the same so I have an HP 27 inch and I have a scepter 32 inch and the HP wakes up faster so it thinks that the HP is the primary even though it is definitely not and then they put the the panel on that monitor sometimes it remembers and we'll switch it back over to the scepter once it finally does wake up uh and in which situation that does what it's supposed to do but sometimes it doesn't and I have to go into the settings switch the primary to the HP and then back it's a mess that's a KDE problem I understand by mentioning it here because it's what I've experienced uh surprisingly I haven't experienced the problem where the monitors don't go to sleep usually that's a problem um Debian then wasn't a problem this time which is a big surprise because usually that's an issue uh and then the the last problem that I've had and again this is not a Debian problem really but I just want to mention it because it was on Debbie where is experiencing it uh it's a pipe wire problem so Debian uses pipeware now apparently and um in traditional pipeware fashion it doesn't remember your sources so a lot of times I'd come here I'd get ready to record a video just like so I'd open up OBS I'd open up audacity and I would get started I get started recording and look at the waveforms and audacity and realize that they're really really loud and that's because the microphone on my webcam was what was picking up the audio and that is utter garbage it's not this you know actual microphone that is in front of me which is what I wanted to use that goes through an audio interface and an XLR cable and all that stuff that I've spent a lot of money and a lot of time actually setting up switched to different sources and pipeware does this on every distribution it does it for whatever reason uh they are aware of this the problem it has been reported multiple times on every bug tracker that pipeware has and it's still you know not fixed so that's not again not a Debian problem but something that I definitely wanted to mention uh just put out there so those are the problems that I've had no so let's go ahead and move on then to community and support now I will be 100 honest with you and tell you that I did not spend a lot of time when it comes to support on Debian and the reason why is because it's been so damn stable uh usually I create a fake support ticket on their Forum or somewhere you know in a distribution and I experienced the community for myself that way so instead what I did is I spent a lot of time trolling around the user Forum so if I actually show you this I don't actually have b-roll prepared but the user forums are here and they're at debian.net which is something that confused me because debian.org is the website debian.net apparently they also own because they link to it directly from their website and here's what I find absolutely entertaining about this is that they use phpb for their form software which is uh come on Discord discourse Bros this course is way better in terms of form software but well that's beside near there it's just it's just such a Debian thing for them to use such an outdated software package for their forms but that's not neither here nor there in terms of support here there's a lot of people on their forums almost constantly so actually I'm pretty sure usually with phpb they'll tell you how many users are online right now there are 50 users online and uh most users online with 17 26 back in 2021 so they have a lot of posts there's a lot of stuff back here so if you need to go find a solution to something chances are it's been here someone probably has have asked that question before and and they have them well categorized so you can see that you have beginners questions general questions things like that so you can actually go into these different categories get your questions answered there's a lot of people there uh throughout the day and you usually get a good response from what I've seen now again remember I don't have first-hand experience I just go buy what I've seen from other people getting responses usually if you ask a question you're going to get a response but again remember that this is a forum and in traditional forum you know etiquette the people who are haunting the forums oftentimes have issues um and that's not necessarily a negative thing they just have a certain way of doing things and a certain bias towards what they do so all the people who are on the Debian forums who who answer questions religiously or a lot I should say chances are they're Debbie and Fanboys so if you go there and you you know have some experiences negatively with other dis other forms you may have those same problems on Debian I haven't seen that as bad on the Debian forms as I did say on open Souza which they're definitely more the Devon guys at least seem to be more helpful than the open suicide guys but I was told after my Open Season video that that has more to do with the language barriers and a lot of those guys being German and that's just kind of the way Germans are is very abrupt I didn't have that problem on the Debian forums when I saw people interacting there so mostly they were very friendly to other people and it just seems like there's a good place there now I will say that the Forum seemed to be the only good Avenue for normal people to actually go get support they do have mailing lists and IRC available to you uh and if you know anything about mailing lists and you know anything about the IRC those are not user-friendly avenues for sport they're just not okay uh there's no Discord there's no discourse obviously so if you are looking for support chances are the forums are going to be the best option for you okay so let's go ahead and wrap this up just a little bit by asking some questions about debians so who should use Debian I've already kind of answered this question so we won't talk too much about it the people who should use Debian are those who really want super stable distro like who those people who want a super stable distro who want to put it on their machine and never ever ever have to worry about an update breaking their system I'm not saying that that can never happen but it's going to be so super rare because updates are super rare so you're only going to get a big big update probably once or twice a year maybe at the most and those are going to be like and when I say big update I'm going to talk about a few packages you know a couple hundred at the most and if you want to and you're not going to be getting a new version of Debian and tell like another two years down the line and so we're going to be on book Bookworm for quite some time so if you are the type of person who wants a machine that is just a Workhorse you're going to get on your computer every day and you're going to know that it's going to work Debian is probably the best distribution for that scenario if on the other hand you're the type of person who enjoys up-to-date software across the board or someone who enjoys living on the wild side that means probably not going to be for you you're going to be bored you're going to want a distribution that is more focused on you know up-to-date software and testing packages and stuff like that you'll probably be happier on Arch or open Souza or Fedora or something like that it has more up-to-date packages okay so moving on to the the last part now from a recording point I'm at 45 minutes the editing will cut quite a bit of that down but I just want to put this out there Debian is a fantastic Linux distribution I I think that if you if I had a machine where I just kind of only got on it like every two or three months or whatever Debian would be the absolute favorite for that particular piece of hardware and even for a regular daily driver for me I could 100 see myself using Debian I had no problems with package availability uh the only real problem I ever had when in term in terms of package availability was futile as I mentioned and I was eventually able to get that solved and got it to work so even that I was able to work around and that was the only big major problem that I encountered the entire five months so I could see myself using Debian as my main daily driver if I weren't so happy with open Souza Debbie would probably be the distribution that I would choose because I'm at the point in my Linux career right now where I just want a distribution that works and Debian just freaking works it and it works well it doesn't have the potential of breaking a long line somewhere like open source it does have that potential because it's a rolling release or at least the Tumbleweed version that I'm using I should say so I'm on a rolling really so I have a much more higher chance of having that break on me than something on Debbie and so I could see myself in the future if I really didn't like that rolling release model so much coming to Debian and being very very happy I've been very very happy with it for five months and it's just a very very good distribution now that being said I'm an open source of Fanboy sticker and uh oh well I've totally messed up the microphone there but I really shouldn't touch the mic when you're talking through it it doesn't matter but anyways I'm an open source of Fanboy now I I've signed up to all the things that you need to sign up for in order to get the uh the card that says you're an open Susan Fanboy and I really enjoy open Souza open Souza is my distribution it's on my main hard drive on this machine and once I'm done with all the editing stuff for this video and it's posted open source is going my laptop it's going to replace Debian and that's going to be the first different Distribution on that machine since I started the Debian review open Souza is just my distribution is the one that I prefer now if I were to compare the two of them the reason why I would choose open to over Debian is simply because I do prefer to have the more up-to-date packages also because I prefer butterfest my biggest problem and I didn't talk about this much because it's not something that everybody's going to experience my biggest problem personally with Debian is that the Debbie the butterfs situation is not a good one if you want to use butterfest which you perfectly can you have to use the expert install which is not the most user-friendly to get to and if you want to actually have control over your sub volumes you have to do all of that stuff manually that means you have to unmount the volumes that are there by default you have to create the sub volumes you have to mount those sub volumes in the places where they're supposed to do you have to put those in the fs tab you have to make sure all the fs tab options are there for SSD and compression and all all this stuff it's not great right now you can use the default settings for butterfests on Debbie and you can do that but that means you're going to be stuck with one single sub volume at root FS which is not the way that I prefer to do things which means that Snapper and time shift are going to have to have some tweaks in order to actually use them and it's just not a fantastic situation I I want to use a system with butterfs and getting to that point is not as user friendly as I would have hoped it would be now butterfest is a very new well it's not a very new technology but it is a new newer technology specifically when compared to what Debian is so I can see why they haven't adopted it yet as like a default or an option for most people so I understand that so I don't need to be talked to in the comments about why they haven't chosen the butterfs option and they do offer butterfest in the the installer at least in certain installers so it's there but I would prefer to be better configured and easier more easily configured out of the box than what it is right now so that's the primary reason why I would choose open source over Debian is because that butterfest situation is much better on open Souza than it is on debians so will I continue to use Debian no I will con actually that's not true I will use it absolutely on my servers on servers it's it's absolutely fantastic and I absolutely what you want to have on a server which is absolute stability so Debbie and fantastic distribution and if you're looking for stability you can't go wrong it's really just as simple as that so that's then this video I know I've been promising the long-term review of Debian for a very very long time well here it is I hope that it lived up to the expectations if it didn't not much I can do about that but if it did leave a thumbs up on this video I'd really appreciate it it really does help the channel I work really really hard on this review so a thumbs up would be uh literally about the least you could do so that's not the best way to put it but I really appreciated all the thumbs up I really I really do appreciate it and if you want to follow me on Mastodon honestly those links will be in the video description you can support me on patreon patreon.com linuxcast you can also support me by going over to my merchandise shop which is at shop.delinescast.org there you can find t-shirts and hats and mugs and all this stuff and all that stuff goes directly to all the proceeds of that goes directly to help the channel I really do appreciate everybody who has done that and we'll do that in the future so thank you very much for that thanks everybody who does support me on patreon YouTube you guys are all absolutely amazing Without You The Challenge just would not be anywhere near where it is right now so thank you so very very much for your support I truly honestly do appreciate it you guys are just absolutely amazing also I I don't mention the guys on Kofi as much as I should so thank you if you're supporting me on Kofi as well thank you so very much as well as well as well as well um I always get to the end I always f it up it's Tradition at this point anyways thanks everybody for watching and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: The Linux Cast

Views: 79,175

Keywords: linux, open source, apps, the linux cast, thelinuxcast, debian, debian 12, debian 12 review, debian 12 bookworm, bookworm review, debian 12 bookworm review, debian review, is debian good, debian vs opensuse, debian vs ubuntu, debian 12 kde, debian kde, debian linux

Id: i4t-Ai4nVAo

Length: 46min 12sec (2772 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 25 2023