Debian became my sole distribution a month ago, but I have been using Linux since the mid-1990s. In fact, I clearly remember when Ian launched Debian and always knew the name was the combination of Deb and Ian. But alas, I never tried it. Instead I went with Mandrake and Gnome desktop (remember that?). What a clunky combination, but it's what was around in the days. I do vaguely remember trying to install Debian a decade later, but I got so may error and didn't know how to troubleshoot it, so I gave up on it.
Fast forward to 2001, when I bought a copy of Linux Unleashed and thought I was ready to dive headlong into Red Hat. It never happened, but the huge tome taught me enough to host my own web server even to this day I run a Debian Bullseye web server without any problems.
But as for the desktop, I found EndeavourOS, as the more friendly version of Arch, but I still ran it cautiously for 3 years, as I always understood it's a rolling release model and things can break without warning. Since I don't want to be an intrepid tinkerer, spending my life fixing broken packages ever time there is an update, so I put in place an elaborate snapshot system based on grub-btrfs, inotify-tools and a GUI called BTRFS Assistant. It ran well for over a year without missing a beat. Then one day Arch released an untested GRUB update and we all know how that worked out! That is now marked in computer history as the day of the infamous Arch release of the GRUB update of 2023, which crippled me and many, many other Arch-based users. While most deserted grub and used systemd for booting, but I had been stung pretty hard and decided rolling releases are just not for me. The forums quickly offered instructions to arch-chroot into the system from a live ISO, but it never worked for me any many others I was in contact with on the forums. So all my studiously kept snapshots that were there for such an occasion were useless. My problem is I began to trust that this was destinay and I was never moving, so I put all my eggs in one basket, so to speak.
Cutting-edge software might sound exciting, but even with my rigorous BtrFS snapshot system with rollback on the Grub menu, I still lost some work. So I started looking for alternatives. After a good experience with Fedora on a VM, I started reading about Fedora Silverblue: having the stability of Fedora, but with an immutable core, and this snapshot on the grub menu built in, wwith the added bonus, that if the new image on boot up failed, it would automatically revert to the previously working snapshot. It worked as claimed and saved me some more than once in the short time I used and experimented with it. The only problem is, I recently fell in love with Gnome Evolution as have remained loyal to Gnome DE all these yers, but had always used Thunderbird all these years. Gnome has given me such a productive workflow with minimal extensions, ddterm being my favorite, that I could never imagine using any other DE. The only real complaint I had with Silverblue is that immutable images do not allow containerized packages to have full access and since mail was my main concern, Evolution being sandboxed could not run properly on an immutable system. The only option was to layer evolution and all its dependencies into the lib-ostree, which is a no-no.
So a brand new approach was needed. I evaluated every distribution with my very specific laundry list and only 2 distributions of all Linux world met my now highly curated criteria: openSUSE Tumbleweed and Debian 12. Tumbleweed lasted a few days: multiple issues with printers disappearing and miraculously appearing on the list. No drivers for the scanner, although I got sanex package working sometimes as WSCL and other time eSCL and other time not detected, but I suspect firewalld blocks peripherals, so I opened up avahi, ipp, and anythiing else. Then I realized after getting obtuse replies from the forums, support was really only there for enterprise with SLAs and there was not much hope continuing, even though SUSE developed Snapper, which was the snapshot system that I was aiming for all along.
So it was down to Debian 12. I had at least a dozen failed attempts to installing it and each time hit various fatal errors. This time I spent days researching the errors and fearlessly installing again and again, until I hit upon a brilliant YouTuber called Drew, "Debian 12 Bookworm Installation w/BTRFS/XFCE/TIMESHIFT & GRUB-BTRFS" who walked through a bare metal install almost what I was looking for, except I went with default Gnome rather than XFCE.
I must admit, installing Debian with a text-based installer was like a trip down memory lane, but the installer gave me the ability to set up my BTRFS subvolumes with the help of this amazing BusyBox.
Today marks a month since I installed Debian 12 and it has not missed a beat. At first I wondered how I was going to live without Gnome 46, when I saw it ships with 43.9, but the changes are not so significant. But I have learned ONE great lesson: it is much better to rely on tested and thoroughly vetted packages even though they may not the latest and greatest, but at least they are stable. The only rule I did break was to not use the stable Evolution 46.2, as I need the newer features of the 52.4 (flathub). But at least I am no longer constrained by an immutable core, so all of Evolution's dependencies are pulled in at the same time without any problems.
So here is what I have now: separate /home subvolume BTRFS subvolumes, Timeshift snapshots on the hour, inotify-tools, grub-btrfs for snapshots submenu on the GRUB menu. grsync on a cron job copying al the critical system directories twice a day including the separate /home directory every 2 hours, which are stored off site.
Overall, I now realize that Debian's approach to stability is what will win the day in the Linux world and I'm on totally board with that, even if it means I don't get to play with the bleeding-edge package, but at least I am not longer a corporation's guinea pig for packages that may never even make it into their enterprise level. If you want to recommend any further improvements, I welcome your help.
So, that's why Debian has exceeded all my expectations!
Fast forward to 2001, when I bought a copy of Linux Unleashed and thought I was ready to dive headlong into Red Hat. It never happened, but the huge tome taught me enough to host my own web server even to this day I run a Debian Bullseye web server without any problems.
But as for the desktop, I found EndeavourOS, as the more friendly version of Arch, but I still ran it cautiously for 3 years, as I always understood it's a rolling release model and things can break without warning. Since I don't want to be an intrepid tinkerer, spending my life fixing broken packages ever time there is an update, so I put in place an elaborate snapshot system based on grub-btrfs, inotify-tools and a GUI called BTRFS Assistant. It ran well for over a year without missing a beat. Then one day Arch released an untested GRUB update and we all know how that worked out! That is now marked in computer history as the day of the infamous Arch release of the GRUB update of 2023, which crippled me and many, many other Arch-based users. While most deserted grub and used systemd for booting, but I had been stung pretty hard and decided rolling releases are just not for me. The forums quickly offered instructions to arch-chroot into the system from a live ISO, but it never worked for me any many others I was in contact with on the forums. So all my studiously kept snapshots that were there for such an occasion were useless. My problem is I began to trust that this was destinay and I was never moving, so I put all my eggs in one basket, so to speak.
Cutting-edge software might sound exciting, but even with my rigorous BtrFS snapshot system with rollback on the Grub menu, I still lost some work. So I started looking for alternatives. After a good experience with Fedora on a VM, I started reading about Fedora Silverblue: having the stability of Fedora, but with an immutable core, and this snapshot on the grub menu built in, wwith the added bonus, that if the new image on boot up failed, it would automatically revert to the previously working snapshot. It worked as claimed and saved me some more than once in the short time I used and experimented with it. The only problem is, I recently fell in love with Gnome Evolution as have remained loyal to Gnome DE all these yers, but had always used Thunderbird all these years. Gnome has given me such a productive workflow with minimal extensions, ddterm being my favorite, that I could never imagine using any other DE. The only real complaint I had with Silverblue is that immutable images do not allow containerized packages to have full access and since mail was my main concern, Evolution being sandboxed could not run properly on an immutable system. The only option was to layer evolution and all its dependencies into the lib-ostree, which is a no-no.
So a brand new approach was needed. I evaluated every distribution with my very specific laundry list and only 2 distributions of all Linux world met my now highly curated criteria: openSUSE Tumbleweed and Debian 12. Tumbleweed lasted a few days: multiple issues with printers disappearing and miraculously appearing on the list. No drivers for the scanner, although I got sanex package working sometimes as WSCL and other time eSCL and other time not detected, but I suspect firewalld blocks peripherals, so I opened up avahi, ipp, and anythiing else. Then I realized after getting obtuse replies from the forums, support was really only there for enterprise with SLAs and there was not much hope continuing, even though SUSE developed Snapper, which was the snapshot system that I was aiming for all along.
So it was down to Debian 12. I had at least a dozen failed attempts to installing it and each time hit various fatal errors. This time I spent days researching the errors and fearlessly installing again and again, until I hit upon a brilliant YouTuber called Drew, "Debian 12 Bookworm Installation w/BTRFS/XFCE/TIMESHIFT & GRUB-BTRFS" who walked through a bare metal install almost what I was looking for, except I went with default Gnome rather than XFCE.
I must admit, installing Debian with a text-based installer was like a trip down memory lane, but the installer gave me the ability to set up my BTRFS subvolumes with the help of this amazing BusyBox.
Today marks a month since I installed Debian 12 and it has not missed a beat. At first I wondered how I was going to live without Gnome 46, when I saw it ships with 43.9, but the changes are not so significant. But I have learned ONE great lesson: it is much better to rely on tested and thoroughly vetted packages even though they may not the latest and greatest, but at least they are stable. The only rule I did break was to not use the stable Evolution 46.2, as I need the newer features of the 52.4 (flathub). But at least I am no longer constrained by an immutable core, so all of Evolution's dependencies are pulled in at the same time without any problems.
So here is what I have now: separate /home subvolume BTRFS subvolumes, Timeshift snapshots on the hour, inotify-tools, grub-btrfs for snapshots submenu on the GRUB menu. grsync on a cron job copying al the critical system directories twice a day including the separate /home directory every 2 hours, which are stored off site.
Overall, I now realize that Debian's approach to stability is what will win the day in the Linux world and I'm on totally board with that, even if it means I don't get to play with the bleeding-edge package, but at least I am not longer a corporation's guinea pig for packages that may never even make it into their enterprise level. If you want to recommend any further improvements, I welcome your help.
So, that's why Debian has exceeded all my expectations!
Statistics: Posted by distro-nix — 2024-09-15 23:59 — Replies 0 — Views 1