Title pretty much says it all. I’ve been using ubuntu as my daily driver for the last 5 years or so and honestly, I’ve had a wonderful experience with it.

That said, with the way things are going, I feel like its only a matter of time before Canonical pulls the rug out so I’d like to at least get my feet wet with something other than Ubuntu and Debian seems like the logical choice.

I mainly use my machines for gaming, self hosting, programming, and weird networking projects/automation testing.

I’ve heard gaming on debian isnt as ‘out of the box’ as it is with Ubuntu. So I’m hoping somone with more experience can share some tips on what I should be looking out for or point me to some good guides. Thanks yall.

EDIT: I fucking love this community. Thank you all for your replies. I appreciate you taking the time to help me out.

  • gnuhaut@lemmy.ml
    262·
    1 year ago

    Use the net installer. Leave the root password empty if you want sudo installed. There is probably no need for you to read the official installation manual, but maybe do so if you run into any trouble.

    There are wiki pages for the most common things you might want to setup, like how to install steam, nvidia driver, enable backports (good way to get (some) newer packages without breakage), and enable flatpak. Just google “debian wiki nvidia” etc.

    • hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      21·
      1 year ago

      Holy shit I never knew you could have sudo installed like that. Always done it post-install lmao

      • gnuhaut@lemmy.ml
        161·
        1 year ago

        Yeah it actually says that in the text on that root password screen. But nobody ever reads that, me included. Literally everybody I have told this to was surprised when they hear about it. It’s a total UI failure.

        • Espi@lemmy.world
          2·
          1 year ago

          It says it? TIL

          I knew about that (kinda intuitively, openSUSE installer behaves the same way and I just assumed that Debian would be the same)

        • legoraft@reddthat.com
          3·
          1 year ago

          afaik, doas is a bit more minimal than sudo, so less bloatware. Sudo has a lot of CVE’s every year and because doas is way smaller, it has a lot less security issues.

          • Cornelius@lemmy.ml
            2·
            1 year ago

            Protip: for anyone in the fence, you can install doas then simply alias sudo for doas. Nothing changes in how you use your shell but it’s now more secure

  • thepineapplejumped@lemm.ee
    16·
    1 year ago

    Maybe a bit naive, but what is the way that things that are going? What would Canonical pulling the rug out look like?

    • AProfessional@lemmy.worldEnglish
      281·
      1 year ago

      Canonical has been pushing their less portable Snap solution and moving away from traditional packages.

      This means:

      • They are the sole store host and decide what is allowed.
      • The apps can be less secure or totally broken on other distros.
      • The tooling to make snaps heavily incentivize only using Ubuntu as a base.
  • anamethatisnt@lemmy.world
    161·
    1 year ago

    If you’re already into self hosting, programming, networking and automation then I don’t think you’ll have any trouble.
    With that background you should be able to google the solutions.

    Debian offers you 3 variants of Debian:

    Debian stable (what you get by default from their homepage). https://wiki.debian.org/DebianStable
    Debian testing (has newer packages than stable and breaks less often than Debian unstable). https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting
    Debian unstable (has the most recent packages and is considered the most fragile of all). https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUnstable

    • varaki@lemm.ee
      5·
      1 year ago

      +1 for using debian with the testing repo, never had issues with it and it’s more up to date than debian stable.

  • SK4nda1@lemmy.ml
    13·
    1 year ago

    Use configuration as code. Ansible, puppet, salt, nix or something else. Debian is nice but its a diy ubuntu. You appreciate the effort cononical puts in to take away the rough edges on places. Using debian allows you to craft the OS you want from scratch, which is great! Just make sure you don’t have to redo work if your system dies at some point.

    • vector_zero@lemmy.world
      11·
      1 year ago

      It’s funny, I installed Debian not knowing this, and I had very few rough edges to work out. One setting in Firefox to fix video playback, and I was up and running on my home theater PC.

  • bad_news@lemmy.billiam.net
    121·
    1 year ago

    Allegedly they’ve gotten better about this recently, but historically, Debian suuuucked for hardware just via the kernel being too old. I was Debian for most things in the 2000’s and early 2010’s (now on Fedora for most things) and I’ve literally had to switch from a planned Debian setup for a server to an Ubuntu one because the kernel was too old to recognize the hard drive and I couldn’t get the process to install a custom newer kernel during install to work (and you kind of need hard drive support ON install). But like I said, allegedly it’s better now… good luck!

    • PeterPoopshit@lemmy.ml
      7·
      1 year ago

      I always get screwed pretty hard with Debian drivers. Just the other day I updated my Debian server to Debian 12 and then it refused to allow my atheros 9k PCI wifi card to work unless I rebooted after a cold boot. After an entire afternoon, I got to where it wouldn’t work after a cold boot or after a reboot. I literally had to choose between buying a new wifi card or reinstalling Debian/a different distro.

      I used to only use Debian for non-laptops but from now on I don’t think I’ll install any new Debian installations on anything.

  • Pantherina@feddit.de
    144·
    1 year ago

    Switch to Fedora I would say. Debian is up to date currently, as things are settling down to be LTS, but over the years it will get fewer updates. Fedora is even more up to date than Ubuntu, but more stable than Opensuse Tumbleweed, which would be the Opensuse equivalent.

    If you want a perfect experience with KDE, I dont know what to recommend but there are bugs that will probably simply not be fixed in Debian for the next 2 years, as they are postponed to Plasma 6, mainly the glitches when fractional scaling.

    Gnome is really stable I think, Fedora should give the best experience here.

    Btw using Distrobox you can run ANY Linux app easily. On Fedora Kinoite (ostree, like Silverblue) I run the VLC 4.0 beta currently, which is only available as an Ubuntu PPA. no problem at all. Do mainly for AUR or Ubuntu PPA apps Distrobox is brilliant.

    Fedora itself also has COPR where lots of community packages are.

    If you want recent deb-based, there also is KDE Neon user edition. Used that for a while, but I switched to immutable Fedora and never going back.

    • Espi@lemmy.world
      10·
      1 year ago

      Fedora is fantastic, but I’m a little shaken about Redhat, which is downstream of Fedora and a big supported.

      Also, Fedora is a bit annoying with codecs and non-free software in general. They are extremely anal about not infringing copyright.

      • dalingrin@lemm.eeEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        I’ve done my share of distro hopping and I must agree with Pantherina@feddit.de.

        Fedora has the near perfect balance of being stable and always up to date. I found the codecs and non-free software to be a non-issue. You enable the RPM Fusion repos and install then like anything else.

    • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca
      8·
      1 year ago

      Someone familiar with Ubuntu is going to have no trouble at all with Debian.
      As for updates, there’s always upgrading releases, or Testing/Unstable.

      • Pantherina@feddit.de
        1·
        1 year ago

        Okay true, there is Debian testing aka sid. I have not tried that long term though.

        But I absolutely dont agree “being used to ubuntu”. Either you are a GUI person and the interface is not the same. Its GNOME and you need some extensions, thats it.

        Or you are from Ubuntu and want proprietary packages, PPAs, or even Snaps! They seem pretty user friendly witg some features.

        Or you want the nice background…

        But apt? You just use sudo dnf upgrade" instead of sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade`. The rest is Linux, everything is probably the same. Maybe some udev stuff, but apart from ADB (which is kinda poweruser stuff) its not actually needed.

  • dark_stang@beehaw.orgEnglish
    10·
    1 year ago

    You may want to try pop_os if one of your main uses is gaming. But debian is very straight forward after you enable the non-free repos.

    • constantokra@lemmy.one
      6·
      1 year ago

      I’m consistently amazed how intuitive and responsive the pop os interface is even on low end hardware. It is so polished and adds so much utility to using a GUI, or even using multiple terminals.

  • electric_nan@lemmy.ml
    9·
    1 year ago

    I just switched from Linux Mint to Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). I was feeling like you; wanting to get away from Ubuntu dependency. I tried out Debian, but it just didn’t feel as comfy out of the box. LMDE is working great. I even enabled backports and updated the Kernel.

  • Yote.zip@pawb.socialEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    If you install Steam/Lutris/Bottles as a Flatpak it will use an updated Mesa stack when you run games through them. If you need a newer Linux kernel you can use the official backported version or something like Xanmod’s MAIN branch/Liquorix.

    That’s pretty much it, and you may not even need those changes depending on your hardware. I recently wrote a comment on how I use Debian Stable if you want some extra opinions on how to make Debian Stable a little more livable.

  • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
    7·
    1 year ago

    Just learn how to activate the non-free repos. Everything else except for the stupid stuff like snap that ubuntu introduced, is 99.5% the same. I’ve switched from Ubuntu to Debian like 15 years ago. Never looked back.

  • wim@lemmy.sdf.org
    6·
    1 year ago

    I’ve heard gaming on debian isnt as ‘out of the box’ as it is with Ubuntu.

    Depends on what your hardware is. Debian typically runs some older versions of pretty much everything. If you have newish hardware, you might need to run a newer kernel than Debian ships by default for full support. When that happens to me, I usually run the Liquorix kernel packages, which has been around for more than a decade and has never caused me problems on Debian.

    For some graphics drivers, you might need a newer Mesa, which is typically available from Debians’ own backports.

    Don’t do either unless you know you need to, because both lead to a somewhat higher risk for an unstable system.

    You can just install Steam using Flatpak, and it works just fine.

    • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      Standard Mint is based on Ubuntu, but they modify it to remove things they don’t like, and can hold back cutting edge changes that might break things. They also give you the option to not use the Snap Store.

      There’s a Mint Debian Edition that is forked directly from Debian. This might be better for OP, as it’s not going to get anything that Ubuntu has added. However, Ubuntu and Mint add their own fixes, so it might be missing those, depending on whether Debian decided to implement them.

    • Sethayy@sh.itjust.works
      41·
      1 year ago

      *Ubuntu based

      Still shares the same debian root but doesn’t solve the not-wanting-to-use-ubuntu issue