Is universal.
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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All my personal servers/sbcs run Debian
I do enough DevOps at work, I don't need my free time to be a job too
The NixOS, it callllssss usssssss
come in they ssssaid, itssss delcarativvvveee they ssssssaid.
Wait i just put an environment variable in conifguration.nix and moved home manager back out of my home folder to a central spot why does sddm take 5 minutes to give me Wayland now?
edit: OMG 6 hours later and I have it working. I have a configuration.nix that i re-grew with my 2025 backup and a configuration.nix.slow that is still broken if i switch it out. SDDM timeouts all over the place
the diff between them give 0 indication why sddm would fail.
I kinda want to go back through line by line and find out what did it, but I kinda also want to sleep, eat and go to work in a few hours :)
edit: edit: no rest for the wicked. I ran it through Meld, and there was very little there. Best I can tell, my home manager was synlinked to the wrong config in the store. I'm running it modular, so the nixos-rebuild "should" have moved its configs. The defunct home manager somehow broke QT6 and I lost my file/edit menus in qt apps, the fix for that was a template override env var in configuration.nix. When i fixed the borked home symlink, that failure stopped being a failure and the QT override somehow gave SDDM heartburn. I hadn't seen it because I rarely change home manager, and whatever was wrong sat that way since 25.11.
Removing the line for QT to ignore the template stopped SDDM/Portal from loading and crashing for 5 minutes straight.
Currently running PopOS and thinking about switching to Mint but maybe Debian?
Do you want to live the boring stable life, where you can just build and build and build your personal poop castle on top of that solid OS for years and years? If yes, switch to Debian. You won't be reinstalling till you get so bored that you get the urge to self-harm (by reinstalling). We can't afford new hardware anyways, but even if we do, the same install will work on the new system with few tweaks. π
The initial setup is a bit more annoying than Pop/Mint/Ubuntu but not too much more. Upgrades are also a bit more annoying but not too much more. There's good documentation for both of those procedures.
Wait debΓan supports poop castles? I finally have a reason to switch from vista!
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It's just the matter of defaults, especially since Mint has Debian edition too. Personally I just cut off the "middleman" and go straight to Debian. Unless you really like Cinnamon, because you'll obviously have better experience on Mint with it.
LMDE, best of both worlds
++ Came here to say this.
The ultimate solution is to have 3 notebooks with 3 different distros.
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I love being on Debian, everything just working and not living in fear of updates. And any software that I must have the latest version of I just install via flatpak, appimage, distrobox etc.
I've been using Debian on servers for 20+ years, but ended up using Fedora on my desktop and laptop.
Debian is stable, meaning it doesn't change often. Packages don't get major version upgrades during the lifetime of a Debian release. That's fantastic on servers, but can be annoying on clients since you don't get the very latest drivers, the newest version of KDE, etc. Linux drivers move pretty quickly, especially for newer hardware.
You can run Debian testing, which is a more up-to-date development branch, but you need to make sure you pull security updates from unstable as the security team do not upload to testing. https://github.com/khimaros/debian-hybrid
If you're new to Linux, then also consider Linux Mint Debian Edition.
I'm literally the opposite. I have been on Red Hat since Halloween and all servers I have ever touched have been Red Hat or a close fork of RHEL. When I decided to go Linux for my daily driver and more self hosting I went Pop!_OS on my laptop, Linux Mint for my wife, and Linux Mint Debian Edition for all my home systems.
Red Hat is for work. Debian is for life.
Corporations refer to this as work-life balance.
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I love Debian. It
- works
Debian is great. but where is the fun in greatness? the jank is what makes computing enjoyable. wabi sabi or something like that.
(i use arch btw.)
I always go back to Debian. It's the spiral. Even bought a t-shirt.
lets goo debian!!
I use arch (btw) on my personal machine because I hate myself, but on my servers and the computers of people I move off of Windows I always install Debian and KDE/Gnome, for simplicity and stability.
For all the fear mongering about rolling release distros I've only been burned once like 5 years ago by some Nvidia driver bug.
I still do the same thing though.
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I've been liking vanilla Debian more and more lately. It takes a bit of time to set up properly, and there are some drawbacks for certain software stacks. But in general, rock stable, no muss, barely any fuss.
Once it's set up, it's awesome for workhorse servers.
And as long as you don't need anything cutting edge, it's not bad as a desktop OS. I used Debian12 with the Plasma DE for a while at a job I had and it was very usable. A few weird issues, but nothing terrible.
I started with Ubuntu 8.10 on Gnome 2, and switched to Debian 8 after Snaps were introduced in Ubuntu 16.04.
I still use Gnome with a very Gnome 2-esque layout. AND default Adwaita. What can I say, it's digital home for me. Almost every app I use is Flatpak, so it's always fresh.
Installed Debian last night hoping to try out the freedombox thing. Havenβt had much time with it but so far Iβm very pleased. Runs smooth as silk on an old laptop. It also feels very clean and straightforward.
I might ditch MX for vanilla Debian down the line. (Extra points for them disabling data collection by default and having it as a choice)
There's a reason why Debian is so popular as a base for other distros. It's just no-nonsense, does what it's supposed to do, never expects praise just for doing its damn job.
I switched from Mint to Debian recently and it's been great so far. I'm still getting used to the idea of no "panel" (tasks bar), but I think I will keep it that way since it looks cleaner. I find it really easy to navigate with just keyboard shortcuts. It does really feel universal.
Only issue that keeps bugging me is that for some reason the sound quality on any Bluetooth device is trash. β¬100 headset sounds like a β¬10 one. An issue I didn't have with Mint, Ubuntu or Windows. I haven't had time to investigate it yet though, maybe something is missing in the default installation and is just a matter of installing the right package.
You could also install any de on top of debian(for example cinnamon if you liked mint or KDE). Even parallel if you like
Or if you don't want to uninstall and install a bunch of packages there are official flavors of debian https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current-live/amd64/iso-hybrid/
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I never actually had to deal with Bluetooth issues on Linux so take this with a grain of salt.
BT audio devices generally support multiple different encodings, for example aptX, but they can always fall back to the most basic and most horrible codec that is universally supported on any BT host device. Sounds like that's what's happening. So you might want to look into why your PC isn't using the better options.
Yes, I thought it might be a code issue. It just seemed weird that with other Debian based distros (ubuntu and mint) I have never had this issue. I hope this weekend I get enough free time to investigate further. Thank you for the tip.
Maybe the necessary codecs just aren't installed in Debian by default? Mint and Ubuntu are targeted at laptops for general use, so it makes sense they'd bundle all Bluetooth codecs in a default installation to be ready for most users. But Debian makes fewer assumptions like that, and is often used for servers, so perhaps they didn't want to bloat it with codecs that many installations will never need.
I'm just guessing here, but that makes sense to me.
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I have never had a problem with debian except for the whole old packages thing
There is no GNU/Linux, there's only Debian
Only linux distro I've ever used that completely shit the bed and refused to boot. Why me?
That's captured in the tier list.
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Definitely not good for new users if were talking desktop.
Blasphemy!
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Definitely need to install LMDE on my T460 one of these days. Thanks for the reminder.
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