As the title says, I’ve been using various flavours of Arch basically since I started with Linux. My very first Linux experience was with Ubuntu, but I quickly switched to Manjaro, then Endeavour, then plain Arch. Recently I’ve done some spring cleaning, reinstalling my OS’s. I have a pretty decent laptop that I got for school a couple years ago (Lenovo Ideapad 3/AMD). Since I’m no longer in school, I decided to do something different with it.

So, I spent Thursday evening installing Debian 12 Gnome. I have to say, so far, it has been an absolute treat to use. This is the first time I’ve given Gnome a real chance, and now I see what all the hype is about. It’s absolutely perfect for a laptop. The UI is very pleasing out of the box, the gestures work great on a trackpad, it’s just so slick in a way KDE isn’t (at least by default). The big thing though, is the peace of mind. Knowing that I’m on a fairly basic, extremely stable distro gives me confidence that I’ll never be without my computer due to a botched update if, say, I take it on a trip. I’m fine with running the risks of a rolling distro at home where I can take an afternoon to troubleshoot, but being a laptop I just need it to be bulletproof. I also love the simplicity of apt compared to pacman. Don’t get me wrong, pacman is fantastically powerful and slick once you’re used to it, but apt is nice just for the fact that everything is in plain English.

I know this is sort of off topic, I just wanted to share a bit of my experience about the switch. I don’t do much distro-hopping, so ended up being really pleasantly surprised.

  • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
    8·
    8 months ago

    I am an old hand at Linux. I started with Red Hat’s Halloween release. A few years ago I bought a Thinkpad and I slapped Pop!_OS on it and it’s been my daily driver ever since. Rock solid and stable. If you have shit to get done and don’t have time for shenanigans, Debian is hard to beat.

  • auth@lemmy.ml
    6·
    8 months ago

    I tried Debian a few times and never liked it… I like the Arch experience better.

  • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
    6·
    8 months ago

    To me, the best OS will always be the one that gets out of my way as good as possible. That includes stability, maintenance, compatibility, usability and sensible defaults. I don’t want to deal with the OS when I’m trying to get stuff done or I’m looking for entertainment.

    And yeah, Debian is pretty good at most of those things.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
      2·
      8 months ago

      Considering that aptitude needs shortcuts it might feel like a throwback to pacman for OP.

      There’s also synaptic for checking out dependencies and searching etc. which doesn’t need the user to learn shortcuts.

      Where aptitude absolutely rules and saves the day is in fixing complex package conflicts… but often if your system has reached that point you might as well consider reinstall.

      • acockworkorange@mander.xyz
        1·
        8 months ago

        You can use shortcuts, or you can use the keyboard menu, or a mouse.

        It also works well in case you ever get restricted to a text interface.

  • Shareni@programming.dev
    2·
    8 months ago

    Check out MX. It has some nice tools and defaults to make Debian better as a desktop distro.

    Debian + Nix (home-manager) gives you a stable system and bleeding edge userland packages. It’s a perfect combo.

    • TFO Winder@lemmy.ml
      1·
      8 months ago

      I once installed MX Linux KDE spin after using manjaro around 2021.

      Found out that almost all applications lacked features, specially Okular ( Pdf reader ). It also felt less visually pleasing out of the box.

      Hence is switched back to Arch based distros.

  • thinman@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    8 months ago

    I have a spare laptop that I use to play with different Linux distros and BSDs, but everything I rely on runs Debian, work and home.

    • dallen@programming.dev
      3·
      8 months ago

      Same! Debian with gnome on my desktop and work laptop. Raspbian on my Pi4. Headless Debian in the cloud…

    • bigmclargehuge@lemmy.worldOP
      3·
      8 months ago

      I can see why. Really liking how everything feels so far. I might also use this laptop to try a flavour of BSD at some point

  • youmaynotknow@lemmy.ml
    2·
    8 months ago

    I won’t speak to the distro part of this, as this is too broad a subject, and there are too many distros I like for different use cases. Now, about Gnome, which is my favorite DE, second only to Cosmic (yes, the Gnome based one), has 1 issue since version 45 that made me jump ship to KDE 6 (which I’ve been able to set up fairly close to how I used Gnome, with some trade-offs) and that is Gnome’s choice of not allowing any Screen Shot app to work, other than their own, using the current Apple justification that “it’s for the user’s own security”, which is complete and utter bullshit. Sure, I can force run Flameshot from the terminal, but who wants to do that? I want mi screnn shot app to work from the Print-Screen key, as it should. I do miss everything else about Gnome, for sure, but I screen shot and annotate them too much to go through all the steps that are required to make it happen in Gnome 45.

  • dinckel@lemmy.world
    2·
    8 months ago

    These kind of posts confuse me. What you’re describing is not the distribution, but a vanilla GNOME experience. That can be achieved on basically any distribution with a healthy package repository. Not to mention that troubleshooting rarely involves the package manager, unless you are aware of a package that specifically breaks something. The recent pixman regression would be an example of this

  • Deckweiss@lemmy.world
    1·
    8 months ago

    I agree about plain english in the package manager.

    Years ago I wrote a script (now unmaintained) called “human Bash” where I wrapped a bunch of my commonly used commands in english words.

    Some examples (parameters in cursive):

    • "please install minecraft "
    • “please update”
    • "search package by command ifconfig "
    • "search file by name /home/user/Downloads *.pdf "
    • "search file by content p_color "

    and so on.

    But since then I moved on to gui tools entirely.

    • pixelscript@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      8 months ago

      Seeing “please” in the script for some commands but not all of them is giving me INTERCAL flashbacks.

      • Deckweiss@lemmy.world
        1·
        8 months ago

        please was basically a more complicated alias for sudo :D it originated as a meme on twitter I believe

    • michael_palmer@lemmy.sdf.org
      2·
      8 months ago

      Just installed Alpine linux with Gnome on my old laptop (i3-3217u with 4Gb RAM). It works really smooth, much faster than Linux Mint with Cinnamon. Aftter tweaking OpenRC run levels my boot time is only 25s (i’m using the cheapest 120Gb SSD)

      • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
        1·
        8 months ago

        Yeah any SSD, even the $20-25 one, works out well. It even works out for a debloated Windows 10 if you were to dualboot. And people that really blindly shit on GNOME still live in 2012. Glad to see you find it good.

  • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
    1·
    7 months ago

    I’ve never run Debian, but I did use Fedora on a laptop with Gnome for several years and it was rock solid.

  • Deckweiss@lemmy.world
    0·
    8 months ago

    The big thing though, is the peace of mind. Knowing that I’m on a fairly basic, extremely stable distro gives me confidence that I’ll never be without my computer due to a botched update if, say, I take it on a trip.

    This I find a very weird statement. Perosnally I use arch on a laptop for work and I never ran into the scenario of not having a working laptop always ready.

    1. I have btrfs snapshots pre and post update that I can roll back to

    2. I update my packages every friday in the last hour of work, where I can roll back or do the required manual intervention in peace

    3. When I have an important time period where I judt don’t want to deal with it, I just don’t update anything. At some point I had everything out of date for 7 months due to a big and stressful project. Once it was over, I updated as usual.

    4. Nothing ever broke since I started doing it like this and following the arch news.

    And for that I get way more packages, no missing out on the newest features and it is way easier to install anything not in the repos/AUR by creating my own PKGBUILD so that I have updates - than manually installing it on debian from make and it never updating.

    • bigmclargehuge@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      8 months ago

      Yknow I really thought I would want to look into that at first, but I find I really like the default config once I took an hour to get used to it. It’s different compared to what I’m used to, but it’s really smooth and fast.