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.
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.
Holy shit I never knew you could have sudo installed like that. Always done it post-install lmao
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.
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
Why not use doas instead of sudo?
@finickydesert @gnuhaut The installer installs sudo.
Also, what are the advantages of doas compared to sudo?
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.
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
Maybe a bit naive, but what is the way that things that are going? What would Canonical pulling the rug out look like?
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.
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.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 ofsudo 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.
Just Mint it dude
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.
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.
I’m glad someone already suggested this. I was going to do the same.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I doubt you would need any tips, also right now Bookworm is closer to upstream than Ubuntu, so it’s better fit for gaming sans some niche missing package scenarios that won’t matter if you heavily rely on flatpaks.
The only major thing Ubuntu has over Debian is the normie friendly graphical , but it’s not great so /shrug .
Also Canonical is not going to pull the plug, that’s one thing you don’t really have to worry about, unless they sell the company.
Tangential question for people browsing this post: would you recommend a different Linux distribution over Debian and Ubuntu for OP? If so, which one and why?
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).
You should try MX Linux, with Xfce it works pretty well, it’s Debian based.
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.
