Like you guys know, I'm a GNU guy, yet I don't like hassle. I use GNU because of the freedom it gives me, really. And among that freedom, there's the great variety of flavours it has to offer.
I've been using Mint as my primary system for several years. I had been through some distro hopping before that, with different desktop environments in Ubuntu as well as Fedora and OpenSUSE at different points. And at work, I've been using mostly Rocky Linux, CENTOS and some Ubuntu Server, but those I use without GUI.
So now I thought it was time to go back for a while to some distro hopping and hopefully settle for a different distro this time. My first try was the new Debian 12. I saw many are endorsing it as the best Debian so far. My impressions these days with Debian is that it really is the very stable system you expect, which I love from it. Because it's stricter than other popular distros as regards software freedom, it does come with some difficulties:
- Hardware support is not as good. I haven't been able to get my desktop webcam working on it, although its microphone does work and my Jabra USB headset is also unsupported. Trying to find external driver has been futile and honestly, I don't know how to install external drivers. I understand this and highly respect Debian, but I admit it's annoying.
- For some reason, FAT32 hard drive partitions are mounted read only, yet this does not happens with USB drives. I don't know why. Trying to change this doesn't seem to work. So my bootable DOS partition, that I can use with FreeDOS, can't be written to from DOSBox while in GNU/Linux. Not a serious thing. I can just copy Stunts and other games to my ext4, but... it's a curious issue.
- Of course, no "universe" respository. That's Ubuntu stuff. So many programs, including some that are free software, cannot be found by apt. No problem, I download them from source, but this isn't something for everybody. I figure it must be possible to add Ubuntu's repositories to Debian, but what's the point of having Debian if you do that? Ethical things.
- By default, libtinfo likes to get installed at version 6, but there's still software that looks for version 5. You have to manually tell it to install version 5 as well. Made me waste some time, but not a serious thing. Again, not something for everybody.
- A difference from Ubuntu and Mint, but once you know it, it's no problem at all: here the default user isn't a sudoer and you can't make it one. You can create new sudoers, but your installation-time user is not one. No problem, you can just do "su" in the command line and that's it. Just don't forget you're root.
A strange issue that's to be attributed to GNOME, not to Debian, really, is that, for some weird reason, the dedicated arrow keys are not recognised in DOSBox while in GNOME. If I log out and log back in in MATE, also in Debian, the problem disappears. Also, I understand GNOME wants to be special, but not being able to minimise your windows takes some getting used to.
So now I've downloaded a new ISO of Mint with MATE to have in one of my partitions and my new distro hopping test will be with Arch. Some months ago, I've been considering to try OpenSUSE again and see what's new with it, but I want something I have never tried and I think Arch could be my thing. The only thing I don't like from it's concept is the rolling release idea, but everything else is very much in line with my preferences, so I'll give it a try soon I've already written it to a USB
I've been using Mint as my primary system for several years. I had been through some distro hopping before that, with different desktop environments in Ubuntu as well as Fedora and OpenSUSE at different points. And at work, I've been using mostly Rocky Linux, CENTOS and some Ubuntu Server, but those I use without GUI.
So now I thought it was time to go back for a while to some distro hopping and hopefully settle for a different distro this time. My first try was the new Debian 12. I saw many are endorsing it as the best Debian so far. My impressions these days with Debian is that it really is the very stable system you expect, which I love from it. Because it's stricter than other popular distros as regards software freedom, it does come with some difficulties:
- Hardware support is not as good. I haven't been able to get my desktop webcam working on it, although its microphone does work and my Jabra USB headset is also unsupported. Trying to find external driver has been futile and honestly, I don't know how to install external drivers. I understand this and highly respect Debian, but I admit it's annoying.
- For some reason, FAT32 hard drive partitions are mounted read only, yet this does not happens with USB drives. I don't know why. Trying to change this doesn't seem to work. So my bootable DOS partition, that I can use with FreeDOS, can't be written to from DOSBox while in GNU/Linux. Not a serious thing. I can just copy Stunts and other games to my ext4, but... it's a curious issue.
- Of course, no "universe" respository. That's Ubuntu stuff. So many programs, including some that are free software, cannot be found by apt. No problem, I download them from source, but this isn't something for everybody. I figure it must be possible to add Ubuntu's repositories to Debian, but what's the point of having Debian if you do that? Ethical things.
- By default, libtinfo likes to get installed at version 6, but there's still software that looks for version 5. You have to manually tell it to install version 5 as well. Made me waste some time, but not a serious thing. Again, not something for everybody.
- A difference from Ubuntu and Mint, but once you know it, it's no problem at all: here the default user isn't a sudoer and you can't make it one. You can create new sudoers, but your installation-time user is not one. No problem, you can just do "su" in the command line and that's it. Just don't forget you're root.
A strange issue that's to be attributed to GNOME, not to Debian, really, is that, for some weird reason, the dedicated arrow keys are not recognised in DOSBox while in GNOME. If I log out and log back in in MATE, also in Debian, the problem disappears. Also, I understand GNOME wants to be special, but not being able to minimise your windows takes some getting used to.
So now I've downloaded a new ISO of Mint with MATE to have in one of my partitions and my new distro hopping test will be with Arch. Some months ago, I've been considering to try OpenSUSE again and see what's new with it, but I want something I have never tried and I think Arch could be my thing. The only thing I don't like from it's concept is the rolling release idea, but everything else is very much in line with my preferences, so I'll give it a try soon I've already written it to a USB