 So, as you may know, I am in the middle of a long-term Debian review and I've actually just installed it on my main machine as my main distro. Previously, I was just using it on my alternative hard drive, but because of the recent Linux troubles that I've been having, you know what I talk about, if I, if you watched the podcast yesterday, I decided I'm just going to go full on Debian and see how it goes. I've been there for about 12, 14 hours now. It's so far been so good, but Debian was actually working really well on the alternative hard drive and on my other laptops. So I'm not all that surprised, but what I wanted to do today was talk about 10 things that you should know if you are thinking about using Debian as your main operating system. So I think these are important things to kind of keep in mind if you're thinking about switching to Debian. Before we jump in, if you would possibly leave a like on this video, I'd really appreciate it. It really does help the channel. So let's go ahead and jump into the 10 things you should know if you're considering Debian. So first of all, if this applies to all versions of Debian, I didn't kind of narrow this down to just bookworm, you know, really, this is just Debian as a broad distribution no matter what version. So the first one is that installing Debian is as hard or as easy as you want it to be. So in the past, I have talked about the troubles with finding ISOs on their website. Now this is no longer a big deal because the initial or the ISO that they link to on their website on the front page does now include the non-free firmware, which is always the hard part when it comes to finding the ISO on Debian. So they fixed that. That's good. It's no longer a big deal. But really what I'm talking about when it comes to this point is not even the ISO itself, but more the process of installing Ubuntu. There are many different ways of installing Ubuntu. There's a Calamari's installer that you can use. There's an end curse, or there's actually a couple of different end curses installers that you can use. And how those installers work, what options you have during installation depends on which installer you use. So if you're a more new user type person, if you've never used Debian before or you're new to Linux and you want to, you can use the Calamari's installer. It's very easy to use. It's just a few steps. And especially if you've installed Linux before, you won't have a big deal with that. If you want more options and you're more technologically minded, you can use the more advanced expert installers and those gives you more options and they allow you to customize your install much more than the Calamari's one does. So installing Debian is as easy or as hard as you want it to be. The second thing that you should know going into a Debian installer or using Debian is that software availability really isn't an issue. The Debian repositories are huge. Really, really big. Maybe one of the largest repositories of any Linux distribution out there, they have a ton of software available to you. The issue that you'll have to keep in mind, especially if you're using regular plain old vanilla Debian stable is that the version numbers are what's going to get you here. So if you are a developer of some kind or you're using more esoteric software that relies on libraries that maybe are more up to date, you may have some issues when it comes to software availability simply because Debian out of the box without making some tweaks, especially again, if you're using stable relies on more tested software. I'm not going to call it old software. It relies on more tested, more established software. And that can be a problem when you're looking for specific versions of software. And really what it comes down to is in the place where you'll probably notice this the most is when you're trying to install again more esoteric software, things that rely on libraries and like Python and Perl and a whole bunch of like the programming languages, maybe that updated quite frequently. If you install software that relies on those libraries, you may find that those libraries are too old for some of the software that you're trying to install. But there are many ways of working past this. You can you can deal with back ports, which we'll talk about later. You can switch to testing, which will have newer software still, if you're looking for more like a binary package or a container package, you could use flat pack, which again, we'll talk about later. So really software availability, it doesn't have anything to do with the number of packages that are available, but more to do with what is available in terms of versions and stuff like that. So the next one on the list is a one that kind of makes Debian really good for me. So Nala is a great front end for apps. So I've talked about Nala before in a video. I'll try to link that in the cards above or in the video description. And basically what it does is just makes apt so much better. It makes it faster. It makes it more visually appealing. It makes the syntax a little bit better. There's just so many things about Nala that are really, really good. And now with Bookworm, it's actually available in the repository. So you can just pseudo apt install Nala. You'll never have to use apt again. Just use Nala instead. And it's really, really good. I almost guarantee that if you use it once, you'll never want to go back to using apt again. So it is very, very good. And I highly recommend everybody use Nala instead of apt. So the next one kind of goes back to the software availability part that I was talking about a few moments ago. But during your installation, especially if you're going to use the expert install, enable the back porch repositories right from the beginning. And while you can enable back ports post install, it's actually not all that hard. By enabling them at the beginning during installation, you have those things right from the get go. And it does save you some time and some effort later on. And it means that when you're setting up your brand new installation, you have access to all the software that you could possibly want, no matter what version that software actually ends up being. So if you're using the expert installer, it gives you an option to enable back ports. You should definitely take that opportunity to do so. The next one, it also has to do with the installation, actually, is that during installation, especially if you're using, again, the expert install, which I think most people probably should use. And the reason why I say that is because it does give you so many more options towards what you're doing. This particular point here regarding the installer is that I think everybody should choose a very good mirror. Now, when you're installing Debbie, and it gives you a list of mirrors where you can pull software repositories from. And all of those are in different parts of the world. And the further away they are from you, the slower that mirror is going to be. That's usually the way things work. Not always the case, but sometimes you can get one that's really close and be slow. Sometimes you get one that's really far away and then it's a little bit faster. But it's usually the case that the closer the mirror is, the faster it's going to be. So during installation, make sure you choose the closest mirror to where you're located. And you'll be surprised at how fast APT and NALA actually end up being. Because the one thing, it's possible that because I was on open SUSE for the last couple of weeks that I just got so used to zipper being slow that APT seems like really, really fast. But I have noticed that APT with the proper mirror just is just so much faster than basically any other package manager out there. Even Pac-Man has some slowness to it. Not so much anymore, but you know, at times Pac-Man can be pretty slow. APT so far, as long as you choose the right mirror, is pretty fast. And again, that's something that's way easier to do when you're installing Debian than post-install. It doesn't mean you can't do it afterwards. It's just a little bit easier during the installation. The next thing to keep in mind is that Debian by default, especially the stable version, uses Firefox ESR as the Firefox version for your installation. Now, this is not going to matter to a lot of people, but it is something that you should keep in mind if you need the absolutely latest and greatest version of Firefox. Some people do need that for corporate regulations, for software and security patches to be able to visit certain websites that require more up-to-date versions of Firefox because the ESR does not get updated very often. Now, it does get security updates and such like that. So you should be mostly fine, but it is something to keep in mind going into it that they do use the ESR version and that version doesn't have all the features of, the newer versions of Firefox, usually not that big of a deal because the new features of Firefox are usually garbage, but just kind of keep that in mind as you're going in that it does use the ESR. Now, it is very easy to get another version of Firefox. You can install the regular most up-to-date version of Firefox or you can use the Flatpak. So speaking of Flatpaks, rely on Flatpaks a lot. So I did say that the breadth of the Debian repositories is very large. It's a very large repository. So you're not gonna have a problem finding software there, but because of the version numbers, you may find situations where you want a more up-to-date application. The best way to do this, in my opinion, is to install Flatpak, get it from Flathub. Usually that's going to mean you getting the most recent up-to-date version and you're not gonna have to worry about adding extra repositories to Debian. One of the things that people tell me all the time that breaks Debian is people mixing and matching repositories from different versions of Debian. They're mixing and matching CID repositories. They're mixing and matching backports and all this stuff. And while I don't think the backports thing is that big of a deal, as long as you're using it responsibly, I do think that mixing and matching different repositories from different versions of Debian, rather, can be an issue. Flatpaks gets you beyond that. None of that stuff will matter. All that stuff is containerized and you can just use it. You don't have to worry about breaking your install by using them. Plus, it gets you, again, access to that more up-to-date software. So, for example, for my use case, I use Flatpaks versions of GIMP. I use Flatpak versions of OBS and Audacity and CadenLive. Things that I want to have completely up-to-date always. Now, not so much GIMP because I'm still convinced that version 3.0 is never going to come, but whatever, the rest of them, I still want to have the most recent versions available to me and Flatpak allows me to do that. The next one is something just to keep in mind is that if you're coming from a rolling release or even a Buntu or something like that, be prepared for very few updates. Now, and this is especially mostly true, I should say, on the stable version of Debian. Mostly for me, in the past, I've used rolling release distributions or things that appear to be rolling release, things like Fedora. And those things get updated all the time. So if you're using Arch, you could update your system three times a day and always have updates to do. That's just kind of the way Arch works. There's always things being updated in the background. You could go a day and have a whole like 100, 150 updates to do and that could happen every single day. That's just the way a rolling release works, right? On Debian, it's not a rolling release, not even close to a rolling release and you do not need to update that thing every day, you're gonna, if you try to update it every day, you can, but you're gonna see nothing to do, nothing to do, nothing to do. It's gonna feel boring, but that's the point of Debian. You're not going to get updates every day. So just be prepared to change your update habits, especially if you're coming from a rolling release. Be prepared to change it to once a week, once a month even, it probably would work just fine. And that's the point of Debian. It's not meant to get this flood of updates. You're just going to update it every once in a while and it will work just fine and that's the way it's supposed to be. The next one is a little nerdy and you may not even notice this, but if you are someone who installs NeoFetch and runs NeoFetch to take a screenshot of your brand new spanking rice or whatever on your system, you'll probably notice the package count on Debian is extraordinarily high right out of the box. And I'm talking about like 1,700 to 2,000, maybe even more packages on a fresh install, depending on what desktop environment you went with. So me personally, I installed the Plasma version of Debian and I have like 2,100 packages out of the box. That's a fresh install without me having installed anything else. That is an extraordinarily high number of packages for a fresh install, but really it's not as bad as it sounds simply because Debian and Ubuntu really count packages differently than Arch does. So if you installed the same Plasma desktop environment on top of Arch with Xorg and all the stuff that you need in order to have a functioning system, you'd probably come in at around 1,100. On Debian, it's closer to 2,100, which is almost 1,000 more. So what's the deal, right? Well, Debian counts packages and libraries and stuff differently and they package things differently which causes them to have more packages. It's just kind of the way it works. It doesn't mean that they're different, it's just the way they count them and also the way that they package them. So a lot of the packages that you would see on Arch are kind of packaged together and come as just one package build. Whereas on Debian, a lot of those libraries and things are separated. So they count as packages, whereas they'd be contained together or packaged together, I should say, on Arch and similar distributions. So if you see a very large package number on Debian and you're not used to that, now you know why. The last one is all about the community and I will be very upfront about this, is that I haven't spent a lot of time in the community but I have quite a few followers on Mastinon. I've talked to people in the forums, I've talked to people who use Debian in my Discord server. I've talked to a lot of people who use Debian and the vast majority of them are very friendly, very, very helpful and aren't snobs at all about the fact that they use Debian. Debian is not known for, I use Debian by the way, that's Arch for sure. You're gonna find many more holes in the Arch community than Debian. But I will say that you should be prepared for many, many outspoken Debian users. Many of them who are very set in their ways and they have particular ways of doing things and they have expectations that you're going to do those things the exact same way as they have always done. Debian is a very old distribution. Many people have used this distribution for decades and they have a very set way of doing things and they expect, again, you to do those things exactly the way that they do. Again, not everybody, I'm not generalizing, saying everybody that I've met is this way, but a lot of people I've come across is just that they have a particular way of doing things and just like with anybody who has become a fan of something, they do not necessarily like it when you criticize their distribution. That's just kind of a, that there is a generalization. People who have become a fan of a distro don't like it when someone like me that comes along who's a very much a noob and criticizes it because it doesn't do things the way I expected to do it. So Debian is a, like I said, a very old distribution that has a mechanism for doing things in a certain way and if you go into it, expecting it to do it in a different way, you're gonna feel some friction there and if you complain about it, you're gonna hear back from the Debian community about your complaints over it, not doing it the way you expect them wanting to do things the way they expect. It's not always a cohesive experience is the way I guess I'd put it. So just kind of be prepared for that. Overall, the community has been fantastic just like I think every Linux community is but as usual be prepared for those prickly fellows. So those are the 10 things I think that you should keep in mind if you're going to use Debian. I'm sure I probably could have come up with about 20 more so if I thought about it for a little while longer but I'll leave those for the review which will come up here in a few weeks. So if you have comments on any of this stuff you can leave those in the comment section below. If you haven't already, if you'd leave a like on this video, I'd really appreciate it. That really does help the channel. You can follow me on Mastodon or Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash the Linuxcast. I really do appreciate everybody who does support me on Patreon. You guys are all absolutely amazing. Without you the channel just would not be anywhere near where it is right now. Thank you so very, very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. You guys are all awesome. I truly, like I said, just seriously, thank you so very much for your support. Thanks everybody for watching. I hope everybody's happy and safe and all that stuff. So I'll see you next time.