 So way back in May, I put out a video talking about how the next long term review that I was going to do was Debian 12. Now my original plan for that was to use Debian 11, which was the primary release of that time period, and then upgrade to 12, which was soon to come out. That didn't actually end up happening because of some firmware issues, but the point is that I actually installed Debian 12 at that point. I've been using it for the last five months on my secondary hard drive on the computer that sits in front of me, and on my main laptop, which goes with me everywhere I go, and also runs my standing desk these days. This is the long term review of Debian 12 Bookworm, and I have some thoughts. And most of them are actually overwhelmingly positive spoiler alert. Debian is a pretty good distro. It's been around for a little while. It's fairly established, it has a lot of software. If you don't want to watch to the next 30 minutes of me rambling about Debian 12, spoiler alert, it's a good distribution. But if you want to get into the details first, hit the like button because it really helps the channel. Let's go ahead and jump in. So the first thing we want to talk about is the installation process. Now I'm not going to go into any details about how horrible the website is. We could talk about that until I go blue in the face. In fact, I've made at least two videos regarding that, so we won't talk about it here. If you go to the website, Debian.org, and you download the regular standard ISO, the one that they link to right on the front page, you're going to get the net install. So this is going to lead you to an installer that is, it's not the most modern of installers out there. I will just put that out there. It's not very modern. It's not the Calamari's or the Ubuntu installer, or even the open SUSE installer I feel is more modern than this one here. This one is an old installer. It looks like it's something that Debian would do, right? It's not a very modern installer. But if you're not hung up on what it looks like, the process is fairly easy and fairly standard and fairly easy to go through. And the biggest issue I have with the installer is twofold. First off, if you have slow internet, the net install is probably not where you're going to want to go because it is pretty slow. Even if you choose the appropriate mirrors, it can be pretty slow because it's going to be downloading quite a bit of data to your hard drive in order to get your system set up. So if you have a slow internet access or if you're catching your ISP on a bad day, you may want to look into another ISO. The second thing that I want to talk about just a little bit when it comes to installation is because Debian does have other installers here. So even if you just use this one ISO, there are two different installers at least on this ISO. So you have the standard installation, which I'm showing in the B-roll, and you have the expert installation, which you'll probably want to use if you're going to set up something like ButterFS or XFS or ZFS. If you want to use an alternative file system that requires you to create custom mount points and all this stuff, you'll have to use the expert installer, which is even more old-fashioned than the traditional Debian installer because it uses an endcurses install system. So my biggest problem with the Debian installers is that they don't modernize this just a little bit. I would prefer them to use a Calamari's installer, and the funny thing is that they do do this. They have ISOs. They have a live environment on them that use the Calamari's installer. They maintain these for every single release, and they're there. You'll have to find them because their website is, again, not good. But if you do find them, those things are available. If they were to make one of those the main installation or the main ISO, I should say, their install process would be very, very good. Now I'm not saying that their installation process is bad. It just feels just a tad outdated, and it makes choosing a different file system just a little bit harder than it needs to be, especially if you want to be in control of your subvolumes and butterFS, for example. You'll have to do that manually. There's nothing automatic about that. So that's the installation overall. Not a bad installation. Definitely not the worst installation of any kind. I just put that out there, but it's not my favorite. So once you get past the installation, let's talk about the out-of-the-box experience. So Debian is a distribution that does not have a default desktop environment. So if you want to use GNOME, you can use GNOME. If you want to use KDE, you can use KDE. If you want to use XFCE, you can use XFCE. If you want to use LXDE, I'm pretty sure you can use it. Maybe they've switched to LXQ, not actually sure. You have an option during install of approximately six or seven different desktop environments. Maybe it's four or five. You have a plethora of different options there for desktop environment. None of them are going to be the default one, right? So they do have a Debian desktop environment that is selected by default. I'm not actually sure what you get if you select that. I've never actually tried, but they give you an option during install of what desktop environment you want to use. Now, I would love if they actually had a window manager as an option. I'm pretty sure that they don't. I'm pretty sure they're all desktop environments. I'm going off memory here, and it'll probably show in the B-roll, and I'm not actually watching the B-roll as it goes on. But the point is that they offer you some selection of what desktop environments use, and you can choose whatever you want. Once you get into those desktop environments, or whatever one you choose, I should say, it's going to be a very, very, very stock experience. So if you choose GNOME, you're going to get vanilla GNOME. Basically, as the GNOME guys want you to have it, that's what you get. Same thing with KDE. You're going to get a very stock version of KDE. Same thing with XFC. So in the B-roll that you're seeing now, I chose XFC. And as you can tell, XFCE looks like vanilla XFC. And if we want to go on a rant for just a minute, we can all talk about how XFC really needs to update their default settings and their default layout stuff, make it actually look like it came from this century. But that's beside the point. If you're going to, whatever desktop environment you're going to choose, you're going to get the vanilla version of that desktop environment. In terms of pre-installed software, you're not going to get very much. You're going to get LibreOffice. You're going to get things to play videos and music. That's basically it. You're not going to get a ton of bloat here. So despite the fact that even though if you look at the NeoFetch, which should appear in the B-roll somewhere along the line here, you're going to see you're going to have around 1,300 to 1,400 packages. Even though that's true, you're not going to get a lot of actually pre-installed software in the ISO that you download and install. And I think that that's good. And the reason why that, and I should just talk a minute about why the package counts. So, hi, that's just the way Debian does things. It's the way Debian counts packages. I've made a video about this in the past. I'll link that in the video description as well, if I remember. Basically, Debian just counts packages and bundles packages differently than all the rest of the distos. That's why your package count is going to be much higher than, say, if you were to install Arch, which usually runs around 6 or 700 out of the box during a fresh install. So it's a little bit different. That's the reason package counts so high, even though the amount of pre-installed software is fairly low. Like I said, just the Office suite and some stuff for playing videos and stuff like that. That's basically all you get. So let's go ahead and move on to package management. Package management is fairly standard on Debian. If you've ever used Ubuntu before, you're going to have used Debian's package manager. Apt is the package manager of Debian. It's also the package manager of every Ubuntu-based distro, every Debian-based distro. So if you've been using Linux for any amount of time, chances are you've used Apt, even if you haven't ever used Debian before. Apt is a very easy to use package manager. It's just sudo apt install whatever or apt search whatever if you want to search for something. Apt remove if you want to remove something. So the syntax is very easy and it's a fairly fast package manager as well. So if you want to install a whole bunch of updates, it's going to go through those pretty fast and it's just a very good package manager. Now that being said, I immediately, and you'll probably see this in the V-roll, I immediately ditch apt install Nala because Nala is just better. I think it's faster a little bit. I also think that it's prettier and has better output and all that stuff. So very aesthetically pleasing. I prefer Nala, but Nala's basically just a front end for apt. So it's still using the same package management stuff that you would see if you're just going to use apt. It's just in a different package. So I prefer Nala again, just basically apt front end. So that's package management. There's not much to talk about. Apt has been around for literally ever. So there's nothing new for me to say. It's a good package manager. It's not my favorite package manager, but also it's just a really solid one, right? I prefer Pacman. Pacman's probably my favorite package manager, even though I'm not using Arch as a main daily driver these days. Pacman's basically my favorite. But apt is a close second probably. It works better. I think it's faster than DNF. It's definitely faster than Zipper, which is what my main distro uses. So it's actually pretty good. So that's the package management situation on Debian. Now, in terms of sources and repositories, we're going to talk about stable versus unstable here in a little while, but we're going to talk about software availability first. And the reason why I put it in this order is simply because it's just usually the way that I do it. So software availability on Debian is actually very, very, very good. And that kind of surprised me a little bit because I went into the review expecting to have to use Flatpak a lot. I expected to have to use Distrobox a lot in order to get the packages that I need. Things like Rofi, things like, and usually, here's the thing. No matter what distribution that I'm using, usually the main stuff is going to be there. And that's going to be true for most everybody, right? So if you want OBS, OBS is going to be there. If you want Firefox or Audacity or LibreOffice or an email client or Spotify or Discord or whatever chances are, those are going to be in the repository somewhere along the line. The more proprietary aspect of some of those applications probably preclude it from some distributions. But the vast majority of mainline applications that you need if you're a Linux user are going to be in most repositories. So I never have a fear when it comes to the repositories when I'm looking for those main applications. It's when I get into the more esoteric stuff that I have sometimes issues with some distributions. Things like Rofi, things like Polybar, things like certain window managers that I want to run. I have had issues in the past and Debian actually was fairly good. Now, I did have some issues. So for example, Qtile is not in the repositories. And Qtile is my favorite window manager. I wanted to use Qtile on my machine and I could not get it to run. Now, since then with some helps from my fellow Linux YouTubers, I've managed to get Qtile installed. I actually didn't spend very much time in Qtile on Debian, I actually ended up using Plasma but I did get it installed. The reason why that was such a pain in the rear end because I had to build it from source and the PIP stuff has been blocked because of security reasons. So you have to use PIPX or you have to force things and force breakages and all that stuff. It was a mess, not necessarily something that I need to talk about in this video. It has literally little to do with Debian and more to do with the fact that Python is not well supported anymore when it comes to installing packages because of security issues. Like PIP used to be the thing that you would install things with and now it's being blocked by most distributions. It's a weird situation, but that's beside the point. So Qtile was really the biggest absence when it comes to software availability. All the minor tools that I need in order to get a desktop or a window manager actually up and running things like Rofi, things like Polybar and other like BSPWM, I need Polybar, BSPWM was there, I3 was there. So if you're looking for those esoteric tools that you'd use probably in a window manager situation or in other situations, it's actually a fairly deep repository of software and that was pretty good. Now there were situations where I did have to dip into Flatpak. So I wanted the most recent version of OBS, so I installed the Flatpak version of OBS. I wanted the most recent version of Audacity, same thing there, I went with the Flatpak. There was only one time when I wanted to download something that didn't have a Flatpak and that was Vivaldi and I had to use Distrabox with an Arch install to get Vivaldi and I've actually had to do that and open SUSE as well. So that's not that big a deal, it's just kind of the way things go there but there is a Dev package of Vivaldi but I couldn't get it to actually work. So I ended up using the Distrabox in order to get it there. So for the most part, software availability is very, very good on Debbie and I was very surprised. Now where we run into a sticky wicket, if you will, is when it comes to versions of those software. So if you are, and we've talked about this obviously many times before, if you're of the persuasion that you need the most up-to-date software, Debian's not going to be for you. Even if you run the unstable branch, you're going to be behind the Arch guys or the Gen2 guys or even open SUSE, right? You're going to want to use a different distro that something that is much more rolling than Debian will ever be and that's just the truth of the matter. If you don't give a rat's behind about what version of software that you use, then stable is fantastic and it's what you, it's just a very good way of getting your software and you don't have to worry about it. It's just going to be there and we'll talk more about stable versus unstable here in a minute when I get there but needless to say the software availability is broad but you're going to have to keep in mind that versioning of stuff if that at all matters to you. So the next thing we'll talk about is updating and upgrading. Here's the thing guys, Debian doesn't get a lot of updates. So my friend, Jake at Linux, he's a fellow Linux YouTuber. He just did a video talking about his channel and in that video he talked about how Debian was boring and that's absolutely 100% true specifically when it comes to updating. Like if you're in the habit, let's just say you're a longtime arch user and you're in the habit of updating your system either every day or every two or three days or whatever it is. You update every few days and you're in that habit and then you switch to Debian and you run an update every four days, you are going to be very, very bored of that over a course of time because chances are you're not going to see updates every four days. I think that in the five months that I used stable on the secondary hard drive on my machine here, I probably saw four or five updates, period not like four or five packages to update. I've had more in that but about four times during that five month period I actually updated and found updates waiting for me. One of those was when Debian 12.1 came out. That was like the biggest update. Other times there might be two or three packages there that was it and that happened like four or five times. That was it. The vast majority of times you'll see in the B-roll me trying to update my system. Let's say no packages update. That's what you get when you're on stable. It's just the way that it works and this is not a problem. I'm not complaining about this. If you are someone who wants an absolutely stable rock solid distribution and we'll talk more about this in the conclusion, obviously stable Debian is for lack of a better word it's stable. You're not going to get a ton of updates here and that's by design. So yes it's boring but that's what it's supposed to do now. If you are on the unstable branch you're going to get a lot more updates. So you'll want to update your system more often. Now I did not run unstable on either my laptop or this one for very long. I preferred the stable ranch just simply because it feels like that's the branch that most people are going to want to use if they want to use Debian. Where stable really shines or where I should say where Debian really shines is the ability to pin certain applications to the unstable branch. So you can be on stable. You can have all of your applications from the stable branch of Debian which means you're going to experience a very boring but stable system. But if there are certain applications that you need to be more up to date you can pin those applications to stable or excuse me you can pin those applications to unstable which means you get the more recent versions without having to completely switch to unstable. Now when I did run unstable on my machines I just went the whole hog. I just completely switched to the unstable branch and the switch between stable and unstable was really, really easy. It was just a matter of changing the sources.list which you'll see in the B roll and it worked very, very good. I didn't have any problems whatsoever. In fact I would say that the unstable version of Debian is just as stable as the stable version. I didn't use it long enough to say for sure if that statement is 100% absolutely long term accurate or not so don't take me at my word there. But I will say that the little bit of time that I did run unstable it wasn't unstable at all. They don't call it, by the way they don't call it unstable. They call it testing so I've been using the word unstable. That's not the right word. So I know that I've been calling it the wrong thing for the vast majority of the video. It's testing, I believe they call it Trixie now is the code name for the testing branch. So it's testing not unstable. So I apologize for calling it the wrong thing. I probably will call it, I have it in my notes as unstable so that's probably why I've been doing it for the whole time. So that's just the way that it is. So anyways, stable versus unstable if I were to offer recommendations for which branch you wanna be on I would say go with the stable version and then if there are certain applications you need to be more up to date pin those to the testing branch so that you get those updates and you can just kind of stick around with everything else being in the stable branch. It just makes the most sense to me you kind of get the best of worlds you get the super alter reliability of Debbie and stable and you get the updates of the applications you absolutely have to have the most recent versions of. So that's the way that I would go if I were to run Debbie in long term. Okay, so that takes care of the whole application software availability, all that kind of section there and now we're going to move into some more nitty gritty details. So let's talk about Bluetooth. So, and I'll talk more about this I think later I'll just mention it but Bluetooth was a pain in the rear end for me when it comes to specifically wireless controllers. So I have been gaming quite a bit more often or at least I did during the period of time I was testing Debbie in and we'll talk about gaming more here in a minute but the point is that I tried to connect my Bluetooth controller many, many times and every single time it completely failed. Now I've tried multiple different ways of doing this I chose the KDE version of Debbie and when I installed it on both of my machines. So I was in the KDE settings to connect the Bluetooth and that failed. So I downloaded Blue Man in order to get a direct connection to my device and that too failed. I also used the CLI utility of Blue Man to try to connect and that too failed. I don't know what the problem was. I don't know if it's my specific controller or if it's something that is going around with Debbie and I haven't been able to confirm anybody else having this problem. So it just might be me but when it comes to at least wireless controllers I did not have success there when it comes to actually using it. Now when it comes to Bluetooth headphones they work fine or as fine as they ever do when it comes to using Bluetooth headphones on Linux you still have to be very careful with what profile they're using. So if they're set to the whole handset mode or whatever you're gonna hear your really horrible quality or whatever so you had to choose day two DP profile or whatever it is and you wanna make sure you're on the right one and in traditional pipe wire fashion it never remembers what you switch, you just select. So every time you select you connect your Bluetooth headphones it's going to be a different profile it'll switch back and forth so you always have to open up the setting it's go to the profile that you wanted to actually have and it's paying ass. Now that is a pipe wire problem not a Debian problem that happens on every single distribution that's not a big deal. The Bluetooth connection of the wireless controller is definitely a Debian issue at least for me because I was able to get that controller to work on both OpenSUSA, Fedora and Deborah OS I believe those are the three distributions that I've tried gaming on in the past five months and it worked on all three of those. So that's definitely a Debian problem. So that's Bluetooth. When it comes to network sharing and I apologize for network sharing I don't have any b-roll for network sharing. I tried Samba and in traditional fashion Samba did not work very well on Debian out of the box I had to do some very weird finagling in order to get it to actually work it did eventually work and it worked the best on Debian to Debian. So on this main machine and on my laptop it shared them fairly easily. Now I had to set it all up I had to install the things and everything I had to make sure the services are running in traditional Samba fashion I did get those things to work so it shared Debian to Debian. I could not get it to work sharing from Debian to OpenSUSA. Now I don't know if that was an OpenSUSA problem or if it was a Debian problem my guess is that it's a Samba problem because Samba is utter garbage that's just my opinion and I still think that I'm quite right about that but the point is that Samba was hit or miss when it comes to actual sharing SSH was perfectly fine worked on this was able to SSH into both VMs and to other machines it worked just fine. I had literally no issues I was just able to bring over my SSH keys that I always use and OpenSSH was automatically already installed and it just worked so SSH was a good one and it does have SCP already installed as well so file sharing with SCP also worked just fine. So let's go ahead then and talk about gaming and my experience with gaming is mostly positive outside of the controller situation so yes I could not get my controller to work but I was able to game fairly well so Steam from the Debian repository installs just like you'd expect it to it's of course not the most recent version of Steam so you're gonna have some issues there but if you have a problem with that of course you can always uninstall the Steam from the repositories and install the flat pack you'll get a more recent version I've been using the Steam from the repositories this entire time I haven't had any problems the games that you're going to be looking at are City of Skylines and Red Dead Redemption and Hearthstone Hearthstone is not from Steam it's being run through a bottle so that's a little bit different both of them are all three of those games work really really well I don't do benchmarks on this channel mainly because I think that they're fairly useless because my hardware is going to run and you have a different benchmark than all of your guys' hardware so how are you supposed to get anything useful out of that just know that Steam worked very very well I didn't notice any hiccups City of Skylines crashed a few times but that's just the way City of Skylines is it doesn't work 100% positively on any Linux distribution that I've ever experienced and it was no worse on Debian than it was on OpenSusa or Fedora or Arch or Redcore or any of those distributions that I've tried before this it worked about the same in terms of frame rate, I didn't really test it to my eyes, which can't tell the difference between 60 and 90 it worked, it looked pretty fine to me and same thing with Red Dead Redemption it worked again it was a very good experience I played it for, I don't know probably a few hours here and there I'm not a big gamer so take my gaming experience and kind of multiply that by how much you put weight onto my opinions but it worked fairly well in terms of Steam I did spend a lot of time playing Hearthstone on the Debian because I cannot get Hearthstone to work on OpenSusa so anytime I wanted to play Hearthstone and I didn't want to pull up the iPad I would come over to my Debian install and I'd play it here on Debian and it worked actually it worked better than I would expect mainly because usually when I install the bottles I have to recreate the bottle every time I want to play it this time I didn't have to do that I just launched it and it launched into the battle.net it allowed me to actually launch into Hearthstone and I would play it for hours and hours on end and I'd be a very very happy person because I love Hearthstone and I wish I could get it to work on OpenSusa but unfortunately I can't so Debian was kind of my savior there it worked fairly well so let's go ahead then and talk about stability because this is, if there's one shining light one shining reason why you want to use Debian is because of the stability and man when they say Debian is stable they ain't lying guys Debian is super freaking stable I haven't had zero problems when it comes to stability on Debian and that was when I was running the unstable branch and when I was running stable they both seemed equally stable for me I spent most of my time as I said earlier on stable so I have the most experience with that it just is a very stable distribution zero issues and part of that of course is that there are no updates of course it's stable when nothing changes if it works after install and you don't get very many updates throughout the course of five months it's probably going to be stable for those entire five months it's just kind of the math of it whereas with Arch the reason why Arch is unstable isn't because Arch as a base is unstable Arch is unstable or quote unquote unstable you know what I mean it's less or it's more likely to be unstable I should say because it gets so many updates because you have the most up-to-date versions of software and when that happens you aren't getting the most tested software you're getting the most up-to-date that has more likely to have bugs and that's when things break on Debian that's not the situation you're obviously getting a very controlled version of the software that's offered to you in the repository and all that stuff is super super tested in order to make it into the stable branch and that means that the entire system is just freaking stable if you want a distribution that never breaks Debian is probably going to be the best option for you now I'm not saying that Debian can't be broken that's not what I'm saying it definitely can be broken I would say that the vast majority of people who have problems with Debian are in three different categories those who can't get it to install it all because of hardware problems that happens on every distribution chances are you've probably encountered some distro along the line that you can't install because it doesn't like your hardware that's one group of the Debian failures that I should say not that they're the failures but the people who fail it using Debian that's one category of them another one and this is probably the biggest one and the people who don't like Debian because of the boringness of it so those people would hop away and then the third one when it comes to technical problems are the people who tinker quite a bit and who break their systems because of that tinkering so if you're on Debian and you're doing weird things don't be surprised when things break because just because Debian is stable doesn't mean that it can't be broken it can in fact be broken you can do things that you're not supposed to do and find out that your system no longer boots or whatever so usually those are the three areas where I've seen that people kind of just kind of come to a roadblock when it comes to Debian for everybody else or at least for the most everybody else Debian is the kind of distribution that you put on a laptop and you don't want to have to do any maintenance so if you are someone who really really wants to get say your mom or your grandma or your cousins or any of your family members on to Linux which and you know going in that you're going to have to be the tech support for those people Debian is a fantastic option for that situation because you don't have to worry about having to go over there every few days to do an update so if you put Arch on there you know you can't wait a month or two to go do those updates because you know the person who has the computer isn't going to do them if you have Debian on there you could go months without doing an update and be perfectly fine there was a point using Debian here over the course of the last five months where I went a whole month without any updates at all like zero updates that's nuts right so if you're looking for a situation if you're in a situation where you have a piece of hardware that you don't want to maintain you just want to put something on there that you know works and you can then send that out into the world to be used Debian is a fantastic option because it is super, super stable obviously I think that that's probably the primary reason why you want to use Debian it's definitely the reason why I would want to use Debian if I were to want to use Debian going forth from now and we'll talk about whether or not I'm going to use Debian on my system at the end of the video so let's go ahead then and move on to some of the problems that I did have so and I will put a provider out there that quite a few of these are either hardware related for my hardware or are not Debian problems at all so I'm just going to put those out there and I have three of them the first one and this is more likely to be a Debian problem than not but I will at least put it out there that it could be a hardware problem on my end so and that is that I've had some horrible startup times on Debian like especially on this machine here in front of me on my main machine that's running Debian on the secondary hard drive booting up sometimes takes two minutes to actually get to the login screen two minutes at least sometimes it's longer than that I don't know what actually is going on I've looked at some of the error codes they don't make much sense and there's no response when it comes to Googling it so I'm not sure what's going on there and one thing I didn't do is hop into the forums and actually ask the question which I should have done but it's actually only happened started happening in the last like a month and a half so somewhere along line something changed either from an update or see nothing has changed in my hardware in that time so I'm not sure actually what's going on all I know is in the last month and a half or two months or so the startup times on this main machine here I've been bad like down right bad on my laptop not great still but also not nearly as bad as the main machine so Debian has pretty slow startup times just kind of like by default it feels like to me it's definitely not as fast as some other distributions that I've tried and apparently in some situations it can be worse even than that so that's probably the worst one other than the Bluetooth that I talked about earlier where I couldn't get my Bluetooth controller to work at all so that that was just something that I already mentioned the other two problems that I've had are problems that aren't necessarily Debian problems I should say they are more problems with the things themselves so I chose KDE as my primary desktop environment on both my main machine and on my laptop I usually do that because KDE is the if I'm going to be having to use a desktop environment I prefer KDE over you know it's just the fact of the matter right so I always install KDE in traditional KDE fashion KDE is a buggy piece of you know what honestly it hasn't been that bad okay it's I've had way way worse because Debian does use the LTS version of of Plasma it's been mostly okay but it has the traditional problems that KDE has it's just specifically when multi monitors are in play so I always wake up my monitors and for whatever reason my panel switches to a different monitor it doesn't always switch to the the same monitor sometimes it remembers where it's supposed to go sometimes it doesn't why I can't do that all the time? don't know and it's specifically worse when you have two monitors that aren't the same so I have an HP 27 inch and I have a Scepter 32 inch and the HP wakes up faster so it thinks that the HP is the primary even though it's definitely not and then they put the the panel on that monitor sometimes it remembers and will switch it back over to Scepter the Scepter once it finally does wake up and in which situation that does what it's supposed to do but sometimes it doesn't and I have to go into the settings switch the primary to the HP and then back it's a mess that's a KDE problem I understand by mentioning it here because it's what I've experienced surprisingly I haven't experienced the problem where the monitors don't go to sleep usually that's a problem on Debian then wasn't a problem this time which is a big surprise usually that's an issue and then the the last problem that I've had and again this is not a Debian problem really but I just want to mention it because it was on Debian where it's experiencing it is a pipe wire problem so Debian uses pipe wire now apparently and in traditional pipe wire fashion it doesn't remember your sources so a lot of times I'd come here I'd get ready to record a video just like so I'd open up OBS I'd open up Audacity and I would get started I'd get started recording and I'd look at the waveforms in Audacity and realize that they're really really loud and that's because the microphone on my webcam was what was picking up the audio and that is utter garbage it's not this you know actual microphone that isn't in front of me which is what I want to use that goes through an audio interface and an XLR cable a lot of stuff that I've spent a lot of money and a lot of time actually setting up switched to different sources and pipe wire does this on every distribution it does it for whatever reason they are aware of the problem it has been reported multiple times on every bug tracker that pipe wire has and it's still you know not fixed so as again not a Debian problem but something that I definitely wanted to mention just put out there so those are the problems that I had now so let's go ahead and move on then to community and support now I will be 100% honest with you and tell you that I did not spend a lot of time when it comes to support on Debian and the reason why is because it's been so damn stable usually I create a fake support ticket on their forum or somewhere you know in a distribution and I experience the community for myself that way so instead what I did is I'd spend a lot of time trolling around the user forum so if I actually show you this I don't actually have B-roll prepared but the user forms are here and they're at Debian.net which is something that confused me because Debian.org is the website Debian.net apparently they also own because they link to it directly from their website and here's what I find absolutely entertaining about this is that they use PHPBB for their form software which is come on discourse bros discourse is way better in terms of form software but well that's beside near there it's just such a Debian thing for them to use such an outdated software package for their forms but that's neither here nor there in terms of support here there's a lot of people on their forums almost constantly so actually I'm pretty sure usually with PHPBB they'll tell you how many users are online right now there are 50 users online and most users online was 1726 back in 2021 so they have a lot of posts there's a lot of stuff back here so if you need to go find a solution to something chances are it's been here someone probably has have asked that question before and they have them well categorized so you can see that you have beginners questions general questions things like that so you can actually go into these different categories get your questions answered there's a lot of people there throughout the day and you usually get a good response from what I've seen now again remember I don't have first-hand experience I just go by what I've seen from other people getting responses usually if you ask a question you're going to get a response but again remember that this is a forum and in traditional forum you know etiquette the people who are haunting the forums oftentimes have issues and that's not necessarily a negative thing they they just have a certain way of doing things and a certain bias towards what they do so all the people who are on the Debian forums who who answer questions religiously or a lot I should say chances are they're Debian fanboys so if you go there and you you know have some experiences negatively with other just other forums you may have those same problems on Debian I haven't seen that as bad on the Debian forums as I did say on open Suiza which they're definitely more the Debian guys they seem to be more helpful than the open Suiza guys but I was told after my open Suiza video that has more to do with the language barriers and a lot of those guys being German and that's just kind of the way Germans are is very abrupt I didn't have that problem on the Debian forums when I saw people interacting there so mostly they were very friendly to other people and it just seems like there's a good place there now I will say that the forums seem to be the only good avenue for normal people to actually go get support they do have mailing lists and IRC available to you and if you know anything about mailing lists and you know anything about the IRC those are not user friendly avenues for support just not okay there's no discord there's no discourse obviously so if you are looking for support chances are the forums are going to be the best option for you okay so let's go ahead and wrap this up just a little bit by asking some questions about Debian so who should use Debian I've already kind of answered this question so we won't talk too much about it the people who should use Debian are those who really want super stable distro like who those people who want a super stable distro who want to put it on their machine and never ever ever have to worry about an update breaking their system I'm not saying that that can never happen but it's going to be so super rare because updates are super rare so you're only going to get a big big update probably once or twice a year maybe at the most and those are going to be like and when I say big update I'm going to talk about a few packages you know a couple hundred at the most and if you want to and you're not going to be getting a new version of Debian and tell like another two years down the line so we're going to be on book bookworm for quite some time so if you are the type of person who wants a machine that is just a work course you're going to get on your computer every day and you're going to know that's going to work Debian is probably the best distribution for that scenario if on the other hand you're the type of person who enjoys up-to-date software across the board or someone who enjoys living on the wild side that means probably not going to be for you you're going to be bored you're going to want a distribution that is more focused on you know up-to-date software and testing packages and stuff like that you'll probably be happier on Arch or OpenSusa or Fedora or something like that it has more up-to-date packages okay so moving on to the last part now from a recording point i'm at 45 minutes the editing will cut quite a bit of that down but i just want to put this out there Debian is a fantastic Linux distribution i think that if you if i had a machine where i just kind of only got on it like every two or three months or whatever Debian would be the absolute favorite for that particular piece of hardware and even for a regular daily driver for me i could 100% see myself using Debian i had no problems with package availability the only real problem i ever had when in terms of package availability was Qtile as i mentioned and i was eventually able to get that solved and got it to work so even that i was able to work around and that was the only big major problem that i encountered the entire five months so i could see myself using Debian as my main daily driver if i weren't so happy with OpenSusa Debian would probably be the distribution that i would choose because i'm at the point in my Linux career right now where i just want a distribution that works and Debian just freaking works and it works well it doesn't have the potential of breaking along line somewhere like OpenSusa it does have that potential because it's a rolling release or at least the tumbleweed version that i'm using i should say so i'm on a rolling release so i have a much more higher chance of having that break on me than something on Debian so i could see myself in the future if i really didn't like that rolling release model so much coming to Debian and being very very happy i've been very very happy with it for five months and it's just a very very good distribution now that being said i'm an OpenSusa fanboy sticker and uh oh wow i totally messed up the microphone there but i really shouldn't touch the mic when you're talking through it it doesn't matter but anyways i'm an OpenSusa fanboy now i've signed up to all of the things that you need to sign up for in order to get the card that says you're an OpenSusa fanboy and i really enjoy OpenSusa OpenSusa is my distribution it's on my main hard drive on this machine and once i'm done with all the editing stuff for this video and it's posted OpenSusa is going my laptop it's going to replace Debian and it's going to be the first different distribution on that machine since i started the Debian review OpenSusa is just my distribution is the one that i prefer now if i were to compare the two of them the reason why i would choose OpenSusa over Debian is simply because i do prefer to have the more up-to-date packages also because i prefer ButterFS my biggest problem and i didn't talk about this much because it's not something that everybody's going to experience my biggest problem personally with Debian is that the Debian the ButterFS situation is not a good one if you want to use ButterFS which you perfectly can you have to use the expert install which is not the most user-friendly to get to and if you want to actually have control over your sub volumes you have to do all of that stuff manually that means you have to unmount the volumes that are there by default you have to create the sub volumes you have to mount those sub volumes in the places where they're supposed to do you have to put those in the FS tab you have to make sure all the FS tab options are there for SSD and compression and all this stuff it's not great right now you can use the default settings for ButterFS on Debian you can do that but that means you're going to be stuck with one single sub volume at root FS which is not the way that i prefer to do things which means that snapper and timeshifter are going to have to have some tweaks in order to actually use them and it's just not a fantastic situation i i want to use a system with ButterFS and getting to that point is not as user-friendly as i would have hoped it would be now ButterFS is a very new well it's not a very new technology but it is a new new word technology specifically when compared to what Debian is so i can see why they haven't adopted it yet it's like a default or an option for most people so i understand that so i don't need to be talked to in the comments about why they haven't chosen to ButterFS option and they do offer ButterFS in the installer at least in certain installers so it's there but i would prefer to be better configured and easier more easily configured out of the box than what it is right now so that's the primary reason why i would choose open suza over debian is because that ButterFS situation is much better on open suza than it is on debian so will i continue to use debian no i will actually that's not true i will use it absolutely on my servers on servers it's it's absolutely fantastic and they act absolutely what you want to have on a server which is absolute stability so debian fantastic distribution and if you're looking for stability you can't go wrong it's really just as simple as that so that's the end this video i know i've been promising the long-term review of debian for a very very long time well here it is i hope that it lived up to the expectations if it didn't uh not much i can do about that but if it did leave a thumbs up on this video i'd really appreciate it really does help the channel i work really really hard on this review so a thumbs up would be uh literally about the least you could do so not the best way to put it but i've really appreciate it all the thumbs up i really i really do appreciate it if you want to follow me i mess it up honestly those links will be in the video description you can support me on patreon on patreon.com slash the linux cast you can also support me by going over to my merchandise shop which is at shop dot the linux cast dot org there you can find t-shirts and hats and mugs and all this stuff and all that stuff goes directly to all the proceeds of that goes directly to help the channel i really do appreciate everybody who has done that and will do that in the future so thanks very much for that thanks everybody who does support me on patreon on youtube you guys are all absolutely amazing without you the challenges would not be anywhere near where it is right now so thank you so very very much for your support i truly honestly do appreciate it you guys are just absolutely amazing also i i don't mention the guys on kofi as much as i should so thank you for supporting me on kofi as well thank you so very much as well as well as well as well as well i always get to the end i always f it up it's tradition at this point anyways thanks everybody for watching and i'll see you next time