Switching to Linux? Don't sleep on Debian 12. Install Guide (2024).

hey everyone so today I want to talk about switching to Linux I know a lot of people are considering making the switch um especially with all the news recently from Microsoft and Adobe and so on I don't want to get into all the drama here I just want to talk about you know how you can make it happen and a lot of people in this scenario they you know they recommend Linux man Ubuntu those are great dros but I want to take take a slightly different tack here and recommend Debian specifically Debian 12 now Debian has been around for a long time over 30 years I think it started back in ' 92 or '93 you know and it really is the granddaddy of many common desktop Linux dros today and I think historically it's had some issues with accessibility right which kind of spurred the creation of of Ubuntu for example right to make that more accessible for the average user but I think a lot of those perceptions are are really outdated especially with debban 12 I think Debbie and has reached a point where it is as accessible to most users compared as something like Ubuntu or Linux me you know and more importantly it gives the user more choice right you're not locked into a specific desktop environment for example um you just have a lot of freedom in the software you choose to install and really once you get past the installation which I'll walk you through today step by step it is a very easy to use drro and it's rock steady and stable both from a metaphorical perspective right it's been around for more than 30 years as well as from a technical perspective right it's reliable it's Community run it doesn't kind of shift with the politics of of the Linux space it just kind of does its thing and does it well so let's get started so if you're a Windows user I've uh I've gone ahead and set up a VM to kind of walk you through this process so so just make sure you have a USB stick ready trusty USB drive here flash drive and let's get started so if you're on Windows just go ahead and open up your browser of choice I just have edge here you'll see I'm presented with many ads and uh bit of a toxic Newsfeed as soon as I open it you know that's one reason I I do not like this operating system but what we need to do is we need to go ahead and install Bina etcher which is a uh flashing USB flashing utility so just go here et. B.O go ahead and download it make sure you grab the windows version at the top here download just bear with me for a second here okay so once that's finished just go ahead and open it we'll open our downloads folder and we will start the install so while that's spinning um all right so once it's installed it will go ahead and kind of open itself let's just get this out of the way get this out of the way so with Bina etcher what you need to do is you need to get an ISO file from your distribution of choice and you need to go ahead and plug in your flash drive so so let's do the first part right let's go to debian.org and right here on the on the right side you'll see a download button you'll notice the Debian website does look a little fashioned but hey I think they have better things to do and it's pretty functional so go ahead and download that it comes in at under a gig so it's one of the one of the smaller and leaner isos because it is a net install Okay so once that finishes it's all done it's in my downloads folder let's jump back over to Bina eter and we can then select that file here so we'll choose Debian 12 12.5 and then when you've plugged in your USB drive it should appear here you can click select Target select it I'm on a virtual machine so I can't actually do that right now and then you'll just click just make sure it's your USB drive and then just click flash it'll do its thing shouldn't take more than a few minutes once that's done go ahead and shut down your Windows machine and then we'll move on to the next step okay once you shut down your Windows machine what you'll need to do is turn the computer back on and before it boots into Windows just pay attention to the screen you should see a bit of a kind of like a bios splash screen and near the bottom you'll find some text telling you that you can press a certain key to get into the configuration screen or bio setup really the verbiage differs based on your motherboard but just Mash that key whatever the key is it could be delete it could be F12 F2 it really varies but just keep mashing it you know as soon as you turn the computer on just keep mashing that key and eventually it'll bring you into the bio setup screen and then from there again that looks different uh depending on your motherboard and your BIOS version you'll want to look for a boot section usually it's far to the right go in there and um change the boot order to list your USB drive um as the first option and then go ahead and save save and exit and then the computer should reboot and it should boot you right into that USB drive and then we'll take it from there all right so let's get started with the actual Debian 12 install so once you've kind of gone through the BIOS section and booted from that USB stick USB drive you'll see this menu here so this is the Debian 12 initialization screen and what we want to do is choose the graphical install it's a little bit more user friendly so we'll go ahead and press enter on that it will initialize and this whole process is very convenient it's quick it's Snappy it's takes way less time than installing something like Windows from scratch so go ahead and choose your language I'll go with English my location United States keyboard layout American English but you know choose whatever works for you it's going to go ahead and spin up and load a few U components here while it's doing that we'll just hang tight I'm using a wired internet connection so it's going to go ahead and autoconnect for me but if you're using Wi-Fi this would be the point where you kind of connect to your network it's a very similar UI to what You' used pretty much anywhere else to connect to a Wi-Fi network right just choose your choose the right Network put your passcode in and then just kind of proceed through that now here I can choose my host name I'll go ahead and let leave it as the default but really just choose anything you want actually you know what let's go with like a Lord of the Rings reference we'll go as Gile um domain name again you can actually leave this blank but I always like to kind of play around with this stuff so maybe I'll do arda.org okay so this point I think this trips up some users um the idea of creating a root user might be confusing especially if you're coming from window Windows you can actually just leave this blank and this is what a lot of dros will do by default they'll kind of disable the root user and just allow you to create your own user account that has administrator privileges and in Windows terms so we can create a root user I usually do but for the purpose of Simplicity let's just leave it blank um for most people just leaving this blank is is the way to go so if I don't input a root password it's just going to disable the root user I press continue and now I can actually create my normal user account right so I'll go with Andrew my username will be Andrew lowercase and then I can choose my password so I'll just do something really simple uh for the purposes of this demo and then I'll just go ahead and confirm that okay so now I'll choose my time zone and here we go this is where we actually start writing files to disk so just to guide you through this the e easiest selection here is guided use entire disk it's the top setting the default setting this will use your entire drive wherever we install it and that's usually what you want to do so we'll go with that I only have one Drive listed here you might have multiple just make sure you pick the right one right it's usually easy to identify by the size right if you have let's say you have a one terabyte SSD for example it should be very easy for you to determine which one that is so go ahead and select that one I'll choose mine I'm on a virtual machine machine so I just have this block device go through there and then this part can kind of confuse people as well um it's really quite simple we don't need a separate home partition we don't need this one at the bottom those things are for more advanced users they do have some pros but they also have some cons so I think for most users this this top option here you see it's recommended for new users all files in one partition it won't hurt anything it's a perfect config it just works all right so now we just need to confirm what we've done we see it's it's automatically not to get in too too much into the weeds here but for those who are interested right it shows you kind of the partitions it's generated and everything but for our purposes we'll just go ahead and accept that and then one last confirmation just press yes we we're just saying hey we want to go ahead and write these changes it will overwrite any data you have on that dis so make sure this is something that you really want to commit to we'll press yes and then it will go ahead and do its thing so we'll just wait for that install like I said it will actually be pretty fast all right so that part finished now this is really Debian kind of living up to its free software principles here um oh I'm sorry so for this one we'll just go ahead and choose no we don't want to scan for additional media now we'll choose United States well choose your location right this is for the package manager you can think of that as like like the app store right this is um it's important to choose the right region because your speeds will be better so I chose United States I always stick with the default deb. de.org continue you can leave this proxy blank that's not something we need to worry about okay so now we're done with all that this is where Debian really kind of sticks to its guns as it relates to just being committed to free software and respecting the user they're asking us and you'll notice the default is no right the default is an opt out they're asking us if we want to participate into in a package survey which basically just kind of tells them gives them an idea of what's you know what software packages are the most popular amongst deian users so you can press no if you don't want to give them that information I tend to kind of do them a favor you know I like to support them in their development but if you're concerned or curious you can actually go to this URL here and you can see exactly the the information they uh they collect down to the actual like schema of that information so very awesome that they do that so I'll go ahead and continue okay so here we go so now and this is why I really recommend Debian um especially Debian 12 even to new users is because you can really build any system you want and it's pretty easy as you've seen so far to do it right and especially for desktop Linux more than the distro what really determines your user experience is the desktop environment enironment so you can think of the desktop environment as the graphical user interface if you're not familiar with this and the two biggest ones in the Linux space are gnome gome I you know it looks like gnome but it's actually pronounced gnome as well as KD plasma here so there's many others that um have specific use cases some of which are quite good actually but these are the two biggest gnome and KD plasma now gnome offers a kind of like a Mac OSX like experience it's very very flashy modern very streamlined it's really geared towards doing one thing at once and being able to kind of switch between your various workspaces with gestures so I think it works really well from a laptop using it from a laptop perspective right with the finger gestures and all that it's really Sleek in that kind of use case it works very well in the desktop too um one thing it does extremely well is it it really um kind of enforces a common U X user experience and design look and feel across all of its applications so if you want something that looks very modern and feels very modern is it's slick and really refined um gnome is is where you want to go but if you're coming from Windows I actually think you should go with KD plasma now this is also a very popular desktop environment um in fact if you have a steam deck this is what valve chose for the steam deck desktop mode and it is very Windows like um it has a start menu you can press the Windows key which is called super to do exactly what you do on Windows you can alt tab all these very common design patterns from Windows KD plasma shares those so it's kind of like a traditional desktop Paradigm if you will and um on top of that though it gives you like pretty much infinite customization so it's much more customizable than Windows which is why I like it and you know I I use Windows for a long time so it's just more comfortable to me but if we wanted choose that one what we'll need to do is uncheck debban desktop environment here as well as gnome up here so uncheck those check KDE plasma and the only things we should have checked here would be KDE plasma and standard system utilities and then if we press continue we'll have a clean KD plasma install and we'll be ready to go but as you can see I can choose one or more of these if I wanted I can install all of them I wouldn't recommend that but Debian gives you the choice which is awesome okay so when the installation is complete you'll see this screen and what you want to do here is go ahead and remove the uh USB drive and then press continue and what it will do is go ahead and reboot and then you'll be put right right back into the system okay so up to this point I've done everything in a virtual machine but now I'm actually going to switch over to my real Debian install on bare metal which I just you know it's fresh I just switched over from gnome to KDE and what I'll do is I'll walk you through kind of the initial steps to take to to just get the desktop ready for use and don't worry we'll be doing everything so that you can use the terminal as little as possible in fact aside from one small portion in the terminal you can use this OS entirely from the graphical user interface all right everyone here we are I'm back again I went ahead and just followed that same procedure installed deian 12 fresh on my desktop with a KD installation now I've logged in so you should be right here looking at the same screen the first thing I usually like to do is kind of change my theme I prefer dark mode but you also might want to take a look at your display settings so just like on Windows you can rightclick your desktop you can change your wallpaper things like that but right now we'll go ahead and configure our display settings and this is where you change things like screen resolution scaling things like like that right so I have two monitors here also a third because I'm using OBS to kind of record this but you know you'll see whatever your current monitor setup is here so just make sure that you're at the right display resolution I'm at 1440p and what I like to do I think by default is they they start you with 125% scaling I like to just put that at 100% I prefer it to kind of look one to one and then just go ahead and apply that I've already done it here you also have plenty of you know awesome convenient options like Night Color I know that's popular or kind of a blue light filter that can turn on at a specific time but otherwise we've done that one other thing that we might want to do is change the theme so let's go over here in our start menu so just like with Windows we have a start menu on the left side click that we also have a search box we can browse through applications notice how there are no ads here right it's an adree experience so let me go ahead and search for theme everything is very discoverable very Windows like experience pretty easy to use so Global theme we'll click that I like breeze dark but there's really there's like thousands of themes you can go out and download and install right from this menu I just like a simple dark mode I'll go ahead and apply that so now now we're cooking now it looks good it's not blinding me anymore okay the first thing I like to do when I install uh Debbie and fresh is install flat pack and really this will be the extent of what we do today once we install flat pack together here you can just run off and use this drro for your everyday tasks it'll be seamless performant and reliable but a lot of people when it comes to Debian they say that its packages you know the application software that it offers by default can be outdated especially between you know after a year or so has passed after an initial release because debian's release cycle is every two years so this is true to some extent but for the most part that's a good thing and we can actually mitigate that by installing what's known as flat pack and flat pack is just a it's a very popular way to distribute Linux apps it's kind of drro agnostic you can use it anywhere and it's a great way to install applications so any kind of app from something like blender to lib office to even something like Zoom you know there's proprietary software as well and these versions are generally updated they're easy to install and you can do it all from a graphical interface like I said we won't be doing much with the terminal today what I want to what I want to show you here is how easy Linux is to use even something like Debian just very easy to use in 2024 with a graphical interface so we do have to dip into the terminal just for one second and I'll walk you through it so just really don't worry but after that it's literally just plug- Inplay GUI based and it's excellent so what we'll do is we'll go to flath hub.org and this is flathub is kind of the official repository for flat pack apps and it's great it's a modern UI you can kind of browse through it see what's available but what we want to do is we actually want to set up flathub so I'll go here set up flathub on the front page we'll choose our distribution in our case Debian and all we need to do is copy these commands and run them so the first thing we need to do is install flat pack so if I just click copy here and then I open my terminal and again we can search for that from our start menu terminal it's called console by default in U in KDE that's just their their spin their specific terminal application let's open that don't be scared I'll walk you through it again like I said you never have to use the terminal again if you don't want to although I would encourage you to learn it you know it's a useful skill to have but in 2024 you can use desktop Linux without ever really touching it all right so we'll go ahead and install flat pack put in our password just like in Windows when you do certain things like installing software it asks you to enter your password so that it can run something with elevated permissions so it'll ask if we want if we want to continue we can either type yes here or because yes is actually capitalized we can just hit enter and it will go ahead and accept that okay so now we've installed flat pack the Second Step here is install the software flat pack plugin and because we're using KDE which we installed together we want to install this one plasma discover backend so go ahead and copy that go back to our terminal and paste that in you can click here or you can press contrl shift V to to use the keyboard to paste it I'll just do this you know for the sake of these of use for those who might not be familiar with the terminal again just go ahead and press enter it'll install that we're good to go and the final step here is to add the flat pack repository so this just allows us to hook up to this flathub repository so we can install apps from it in a secure way so again we'll go ahead and paste that in we have to authenticate and we are good to go so what we'll need to do now before we can finish our our setup today and and before I can really show you how easy it is to install apps get off and running with this system just need to do a quick reboot so let's do it all right I'm back freshly restarted so what you'll notice is in the bottom left you've got this blue icon this is the Discover software Center and this is KD's built-in graphical interface for managing your software searching searching for software installing new software updating your system you can literally do it all from here without ever touching the terminal so we had a little brief escapate into the teral earlier I promise you never have to touch it again if you don't want to but you can you know it's there for you it's your choice as a user so this is nice it's easy to use you know we can search things maybe Spotify it's a popular app come in here I can install it in one click there it is it's a proprietary app which it it lets you know right but doesn't stop you from installing it maybe I want something a little um more fast friendly just to kind of illustrate the point I'll install something simple that's fast just so you don't have to wait around we'll install color paint just need to authenticate so that um discover can make changes to my system all right there we go that's installing already done and then I can launch it easy as that right this is just a basic like this is KD's version of paint right simple painting program but yeah it's really that easy to use it's a good user experience it's fast it's secure um you've got everything you need now to use Debian to use desktop Linux hope you enjoyed the video You're Now a Debian eista thanks for watching I think in the future I'll explore how we take this Baseline install and really tweak and configure it for specific use cases like for example gaming or productivity or even programming awesome thanks for watching Stay Free and stay curious

Channel: Community Compute

Views: 7,063

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Id: SxXO9ZXOglU

Length: 23min 21sec (1401 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 10 2024