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Tips for switching to Debian from Ubuntu?

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.

Pantherina ,

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 ,

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 ,

I’ve done my share of distro hopping and I must agree with [email protected].

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 ,

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 ,

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.

rufus ,

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.

library_napper ,
@library_napper@monyet.cc avatar

Just Mint it dude

bad_news ,

deleted_by_author

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    PeterPoopshit , (edited )

    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.

    electric_nan ,

    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.

    wim , (edited )

    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.

    hellvolution ,
    @hellvolution@lemmygrad.ml avatar

    No tips needed; everything will work rock-solid and you’ll never return to Ubuntu

    Rhabuko ,
    @Rhabuko@feddit.de avatar

    No idea if Ubuntu does some things better for gaming, but I just use the Steam Flatpak (+ the “steam-devices” package for much better controller support) and the Heroic Game Launcher Flatpak. Everything works fine on my end. I’m currently using an AMD card, but will probably switch to an Intel Arc in the near future (since they have better performance for 3d rendering in Blender, and I’m fed up with Nvidia’s prices).

    SK4nda1 ,

    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 ,

    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.

    Frederic ,

    You should try MX Linux, with Xfce it works pretty well, it’s Debian based.

    gnuhaut ,

    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 ,

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

    lemann ,

    Same lol, I was confused at why some of my selfhosting boxes had sudo and some didn’t, despite being installed fresh from the same ISO

    gnuhaut ,

    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 ,

    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)

    finickydesert ,
    @finickydesert@lemmy.ml avatar

    Why not use doas instead of sudo?

    espi ,

    @finickydesert @gnuhaut The installer installs sudo.

    Also, what are the advantages of doas compared to sudo?

    legoraft ,
    @legoraft@reddthat.com avatar

    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 ,

    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

    tokyo ,

    There was an issue with Debian installs a few weeks ago where it broke due to some modules. It can be avoided by using the net installer.

    If you’re using an Nvidia card, you will need to download the appropriate drivers. The Debian docs explain the steps, just read carefully to make sure you don’t miss something small.

    If you want to make it as seamless as possible, use Debian with Gnome.

    Apart from that, there is virtually no difference. You can get and use all the same packages. Games on steam run without issue (or any more than reported by other distributions). I don’t use PPAs but between official debs and flatpak, I haven’t had any issues getting software that I needed.

    FWIW I ran: Apex Legends, Resident Evil 1+2, FFXIV, Gears 5, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk and plenty more without a single crash or glitch.

    I also switched to Debian from Ubuntu. It wasn’t perfectly smooth but once you get set up, it’s as stable as can be.

    PseudoSpock ,
    @PseudoSpock@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

    Don’t, unless you like snaps.

    lily33 ,

    I think you misread the OP.

    PseudoSpock ,
    @PseudoSpock@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

    Worse than that, I didn’t read beyond the topic. The question itself creates like this automatic PTSD response. ;)

    FuckyWucky ,

    On server I found it to be basically the same except for some installed programs. Dunno about gaming doe.

    Why not try Mint? Also Debian based

    Tippon ,

    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 ,

    *Ubuntu based

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

    thepineapplejumped ,

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

    AProfessional ,

    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.
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