[Discussion] Not a rant but a cry for help...

Hi all.
Returning to Debian after erring into the jungle of various distros (Suse, Fedora, Ubuntu, KUbuntu) for a decade or so. I say erring because I really had no reason whatsoever to leave Debian in the first place: it worked well, it did what I wanted it to do, it was stable. I guess one of the reasons was that I wanted to experiment? Anyway, back I am, and Debian has now reached version 12, and I now have a few more white hair...
And sadly I can't say I'm very impressed.

My system is a Dell OptiPlex 7070:

• 8 × Intel® Core™ i7-9700 CPU @ 3.00GHz

• 31.1 GiB of RAM

• Mesa Intel® UHD Graphics 630 (driving 2 HDMI ports, both in use)

• SSD: Micron 2200S NVMe 1024GB

Debian:

• GNU/Linux 12

• Operating System: Debian GNU/Linux 12

• KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.5

• KDE Frameworks Version: 5.103.0

• Qt Version: 5.15.8

• Kernel Version: 6.1.0-25-amd64 (64-bit)

• Graphics Platform: Wayland

Problems.

It all started at install time... I should've known then that I was heading for trouble.

• When installing, at some stage one is asked to choose between installing software from the installation media or from internet. I tried both (yes, that's two installs right there!) and in both instances I ended up with Discovery giving me an error message as it opened (https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=155958) OK so I solved it, but the point here is that unless one is ready to go into the console and mess around with system files, one is pretty much stuck.

• The software that's installed automatically include strange choices: a Thai language console, a multitude of KDE Plasma Desktop applets, that sort of thing. I understand that KDE Plasma applets will be offered as a result of my choice of desktop manager (KDE Plasma) but surely there must be a way of preventing all this to install as default. Or, at the very least, offer a list and let people pick what they want.

• Three apps (that I found so far) don't behave as expected.
  • Anydesk, the tray icon is mostly unresponsive (it worked in KUbuntu).
  • Pragha no longer minimises as a tray icon, and refuses to save its preferences (it did in KUbuntu).
  • Dolphin will intermittantly lose drag and drop facility when copying/moving files. Also, again intermittantly, Dolphin will take up to several minutes to eject an external storage device. I realise the latter may not be directly Dolphin's problem.

• Generally, I find that my machine has got sluggish, doesn't respond as quickly as it did with KUbuntu to mouse clicks and to keyboard input.

OK, I'll concede that Anydesk isn't in the default Debian repo so any problem with it is Anydesk's, not Debian's. Pragha however has been installed from the Debian repo, and as such I would expect it to work according to specs. As for Dolphin, I didn't even install it as it came out of the box in the Debian install. And as I said earlier, all these apps behaved very well in KUbuntu.

It's getting to the point where I am losing faith in this install. What else is going to fail?
I am thinking of throwing the towel on this install and reinstall Debian 12 one last time. However I would pick another desktop as I am starting to suspect that the errors I'm getting are related to KDE Plasma rather that Debian. Is there anyway to confirm this? Perhaps a log somewhere in /var/log/?
I would appreciate if someone could help me to a path of resolution.
Kind regards to y' all.

Statistics: Posted by pierrick — 2024-09-26 10:12 — Replies 1 — Views 84

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