 About a month ago, I put up a poll asking what you'd like to see as my first long-term distro review. Now, for the last year of the channel, most of my reviews have been, reviews have been, I install the distro, I walk you through the applications and I give you some very early first impressions. That's basically what every YouTuber does. Those are good. They get a lot of views, and that's the reason why the YouTubers including me continue to do them. People like watching those kind of videos. I think they're kind of boring to make. But I decided at that point that I wanted to incorporate at least a few more long-term in-depth reviews. And in that poll, among several options, Debian 11 Bullseye with BSPWM was the winner. So for the last month or so, I'm not exactly sure how long it's been. It's been more than a month. I've been using Debian 11 Bullseye on various computers. That computer behind me has had it on it for the full month and I've used it a couple hours a day. It's my standing desk and that's where I do a little bit of work and writing. In the last week or so, I've moved Debian 11 Bullseye over to my main machine on a second hard drive and I've been booting into it every day and using it as my full-time daily driver. And I have some thoughts. So be prepared for a fairly long video. Let's go ahead and dive in. So the first thing you should know is that throughout this video, you're going to be seeing some b-roll of me racing BSPWM on Debian. That's for some areas where I don't actually have footage to show you of the things that I'm talking about. That way you don't have to stare at my face the whole time and you can just see some nice footage of me racing things. I will probably speed that stuff up a little bit so that it's not, you know, so slow. But anyway, so you'll see some b-roll throughout the video. And the rest of it will be me actually talking to you while I'm actually recording this. So the first thing you should know, so the first thing we should talk about is installation and we're going to spend some time on this because I think it's really important. Debian is not a new user friendly distro. I'm just going to come out and say that right now. And the main reason I can't recommend Debian for new users is because the installation process is not good. Now I'm not saying that the installation process is hard. I'm saying it's not good. There's a difference. And the reason why I'm saying that is because of something that I've talked about on the channel before, Tyler has talked about over on his channel before, and that is discoverability of ISOs. So I'm actually going to show you right now how you'd go about finding several different ISOs on the Debian website. So if you go to Debian.org and you want to download Debian, you probably think that you just hit this button here and you get to download ISO and you're good to go. That's the way most distros work, right? And it's the way it should work. This is the ISO they want you to download, otherwise they wouldn't put it on their first page. But there's a problem with this ISO. This ISO here has no non-free blobs in it. And what that means is that if you have Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or any of those kinds of wireless cards in your computer, like in a laptop, like all of them do, there's a good chance that you are not going to be able to use this distro without finding some extra bits. And that's a horrible experience. Let me just tell you that. So the thing is, this was the first ISO I downloaded, because of course it is. On the homepage I came here, download ISO, DD, the thing onto a USB key, and I put it on that laptop. And I got into the installation media, okay, I mean it's dated, but whatever. The first thing you come to after you choose your language, I think, is telling you your hardware requires non-free software in order to run. And in this case it's talking about Wi-Fi. And the thing is, with this in Debian Installer, you need the internet in order to install it. You can't install it without it. Now they do have some ISOs that aren't in installs, but in this particular case you need that internet to actually install the thing. Now I'm not sure if there's a workaround past that, if you happen to have that ethernet in order to, like that computer back there isn't hooked up with the ethernet. So maybe the ethernet cable was plugged in, it would have let me bypass that and then use it that way, or maybe there's an offline version that I just wasn't aware of. But for sure, Wi-Fi wasn't going to work. And that laptop back there doesn't actually have an ethernet port on it, so I can even run an ethernet cable to it if I wanted to. So that is a horrible experience, right? So I came back, I got the USB key out of the laptop, and I came back to the website over here on my main computer. And I went searching for other things. So I mean, there's no mention here on the front page of other ISOs, there's none. The only one you can actually see on this front page is that one. But if you click more here, and you click download, and you click, I'm going to actually have to find this, let's see here, a few moments later. I believe you click on this one here, and you click on, actually, I still don't know. I've done this a couple of times and I'm still just utterly confused by their website. Because let's see if it was this one here. If we go to stable, and then we click, do, do, do, no, it's not that one either. Okay, so as you can see, the ISO that we need is going to be called non-free, or yeah, I think it's going to be the ISO with non-free blobs or something. It's called something weird, but you can't find it. You can sit here on their websites for ages and ages, and you're not going to be able to find it unless you happen to know your way around their website. And I don't. Like I was a completely new Debian user. This is a bad experience. You need to have one page to find all their ISOs. So every time I mention this on a podcast or whatever, or Tyler mentions it, there's somebody in the comments that says, well, you can just Google it. Well, that's not the way things are supposed to work when you want somebody to use your distro. You don't want to have somebody to have to go to a third party tool in order to find your things that you're supposed to freely give out, or easily make available. I should say, I mean, if you can't distribute your ISOs in a way that makes it easy to find, I don't trust you to do other things that are way more complicated than that. So let's go ahead and do this non-free Debian ISO. And yeah, you can find the non-free Debian ISO page right here. Now how you'd find that if you're going from the home page, I still don't know. But you're not done yet. You can go through and check. There's two options here, non-free and live non-free. This one here will give you the regular Debian installer, which doesn't have a live environment. This one here has a live environment, and you can go through and choose your appropriate architecture. So you have to know that, obviously. And then you get here, I mean, what is even BT hybrid? What is this doing here? And then ISO, I mean, in order to get to this point, you have to know many things about Linux in order for it to actually, in order for you to actually get to an ISO that you can download that will work and have the non-free blobs there. And this is just a, it's a shitty experience. Let's just put it very frank. This right here turns me completely off from Debian before I even got Debian installed. And if that's the case with your distro, you're failing. Now, the thing is Debian is very popular, right? There's a reason why Ubuntu and a whole bunch of other distributions out there base themselves on Debian because it's not a bad distro. And I'm going to talk a lot more about the actual distro here in a minute, but from a new user perspective, for someone who's never used Debian before, this experience is bad. So just to finish this up, you can go through and download an ISO here with various different window managers or various different desktop environments and so on and so forth. They have several different ones. They're all good. This is the plasma one because I'm a plasma, because of nostalgic reasons, I guess, because I used to use plasma, but it's good. Once I got the ISO downloaded, the appropriate ISO, I was able to install it on that computer. It worked fine for the most part, and I'm going to talk about that later. But from the installation point, once you find the ISO, it's good. Now, the installation itself will vary depending on which ISO you choose. If you're using the non-free ISO and you choose the non-live version, you're just going to get a very old-styled installer. It's fine. It's not going to be anything great. If you choose the live version, you'll get Calamaris. Now, I don't actually have this to show you, but if you've used Calamaris before, you'll be very familiar with it. If you don't choose the live one and you have that more old-style installer, it's a little bit different, but it's not hard. As long as you can read and you go through and read the instructions, it's not hard at all. In fact, I'd say it's easy. But like I said, that's only once you've found the ISO. As long as you've found the ISO and got to that point, installing a Debian is actually really easy. It's just the finding the ISO that is actually a pan-ass. That's installation. Once you've gotten it installed, Debian itself is actually really good. Let's go ahead and jump into the rest of the review. Once you've gotten it installed, if you've used Debian before, you'll notice a few new features. There's not a ton of new features here in Debian 11. From Debian 10, there's a new theme. There's obviously a whole bunch of upgrades to different pieces of software that means you get some more recent software. Now, I'm going to talk about app availability and versions of apps in a few minutes. But one of the new things you get in Debian 11 is more recent software. It's not new software by any means. For example, if you install the GNOME version, you get 3.38. You don't get GNOME 40. That's the same with pretty much any desktop environment you install or any application you install. It's always going to be a few versions behind. Now, that's not a big deal because you're going to have to know that going into Debian. That's just the way Debian Stable is. If you're going to download Debian Stable, you're going to know that you're always going to be a little bit behind on that software because what they're going for, what they're aiming for, is stability above all else. If that's the way you want to run your Linux desktop, Debian is probably the best choice for you because Debian is maybe the most stable distro that I've ever used. There are a couple problems which I'll talk about later. Other than some newer versions of software, you get Linux kernel 5.10 LTS. You get printer and scanner improvement. So you get more support for printer and scanners, you get XFAT support, and of course Debian still supports 32-bit. So like I said, there's not a ton of new features here in Debian 11 that you're really going to notice because that's not really what Debian does. They're not here for new shiny features. They're here for stability. That's what they're meant to do. So speaking of stability, let's talk a little bit about my experiences with the stability. I think that Debian hates me because on that laptop back there where I spent most of my time with Debian over the last month, I've had two situations that have cropped up where Debian just didn't like me. So the first one, on my first install, I installed the XFCE version of the non-free ISO. And then I installed BSPWM. Some of the footage that you've seen so far of me writing BSPWM on Debian comes from that install where I installed from the non-free ISO using the XFCE image and then installed BSPWM. And I used that for a couple weeks. And then I did an update. Now at that point, I had been using an installation of Debian that started as Debian 10 busted and changed to the sources.list file or whatever it's called to the Bullseye repositories. So it was before Bullseye was released. When I did that and switched over, I switched over to Fine. And I was using Debian 11 just fine for at least a good week before it crashed. And when I say crashed, I mean after an update, I shut down and restarted just like you do. And I got to the display manager and tried to log in and it went log in. It just popped me right back to the display manager. And it did that over and over again. Now I thought maybe the BSPWM install was fried or something. And sometimes when you do an update of something, maybe something got deleted or something got misplaced or a file path changed, it happens. So I tried to log into the XFCE session and that did the same thing. So I have no clue what was going on there. There's a good chance that the problem there lied in dependencies that were removed during the update that had been there for Buster, but that had to be removed for Bullseye. And something I was using there was required some of those dependencies. It was weird. So I came back. I found a different ISO. In this case, it was the KDE Plasma version of the non-free ISO. And that's what's on there now. And it works fine. The KDE session of that install works fine. And the internet works, and the Wi-Fi works, and it's good. The problem is that when I installed BSPWM, whatever reason when I switched over to that session, I can't get Wi-Fi to work under BSPWM on there right now. I mean, I can go over there now and try to install something, and it's just not connecting to the internet. I don't know why. I haven't been able to find a good reason for it. And I've gotten into the forums and stuff of Debbie, and nobody seems to know what was going on, or why. The network manager session is running in the background, or the service is running in the background just fine. The status is fine. Ping doesn't work either. So it's not connecting through the Wi-Fi. For whatever reason, under BSPWM, it's just not working. And that started out as a Debbie and 11 bullseye ISO, so that can't have anything to do with Buster. So I don't know what's going on with that. I haven't had any of those problems in the week I've been using it on my desktop here. I did install it the first time. Apparently I chose the wrong ISO, and I came across that whole non-free thing again. I shouldn't have any problems with non-free stuff on this thing, because it doesn't even have Wi-Fi hooked up. So I shouldn't have any problems with that. But it still warned me that I needed the non-free stuff, and that was a pain in the ass, so I had to go find a different ISO and did finally get installed. So now that I've been using it on my main computer now for a week, I've been able to do a little bit more in terms of exploration, in terms of applications and stuff like that, because the apps that I need on that computer back there aren't really all that vast. I need LibreOffice. That's about it, because all I do on that computer is I stand there and I write. There were a few things that I couldn't get on there that I wanted. For example, Alacrity is not in the repose, so I had to use Kitty. Not a big deal. Polybar was on there, it was fine. Rofi's on there, it was fine. So in terms of app availability, in terms of some things, it actually wasn't bad. If I had just used that computer for the minimal amount of things that I use it for, I would say that the app availability is actually quite good. It was actually quite surprising, because I expected to have no applications that I wanted at all. I installed Debian here on this computer, and yeah, app availability on Debian is bad. It just is. There are several examples that I can use. Things like Alacrity, not available, Discord is not available in the repose. You have to install a Debian package in order to get it installed, if you want to install it that way. For whatever reason, the Debian package wouldn't work for me, so I ended up having to use a Snap in order to get Discord installed. My to-do application called Todoist, I had to use a Snap in order to get that installed. Now I didn't expect Todoist to be in the Debian repose. It's not in the standard arch repository either that's in the AUR, so I wasn't expecting it to be there. But just because I had to use a Snap kind of pissed me off, because the Snap version is terrible, that's not has nothing to do with Debian, by the way, whoever packages the Todoist app for Snapcraft is just, I mean, they need to fix that thing, because it's terrible. That being said, there are a lot of applications in the Debian repose that are things that I use. So things like Audacity was there, CadenLive was there, Nitrogen was there. I talked about Alacrity before. Alacrity is not even part of a Snap thing. I actually had to build that from scratch, which was very fun. Things like Envim and all that kind of stuff, they're all in the repositories. So when I say app availability isn't all that great, it's more that it wasn't great for me. And the reason why I have that feeling that app availability wasn't great is because the apps that I needed to use that I had to go elsewhere for, I ended up having to use Snaps. And I hate Snaps with a patch and I can't stand them. Not only is the backend not open source, I don't really, I mean, it's not a huge deal. I use proprietary software all the time, you know, I have to, or in some cases I even want to, because it's just better than, you know, the open source offerings, unfortunately. So that's not a huge deal for me. My biggest problem with Snaps, and I don't really want to get too far into this, is that they put a Snap folder in your home directory and you can't remove it. It pisses me off. It's the stupidest thing ever. So like I said, I don't want to get into it, but it's dumb. So the best thing I can tell you in terms of app availability is to just know going in that there are going to be some applications that you're going to have to go elsewhere for. Whether that's a PPA, whether that's a Dev package, whether it's a Snap or a Flat Pack, you're probably going to have to find other places to get that kind of, some of your software, and that's just the way it is. The repos aren't as full as they are on Ubuntu, say, because Ubuntu has their own repositories that are much more maintained, and they have a ton more in them, at least in my experience. And don't even be talking in terms of compatibility or comparing Debian to the AUR. It's not even close. Now, the last thing in the section is a doozy. I should really talk about this. If you're coming from Arch, let's just say you're coming from Arch and you're going to try Debian. That's my experience. So that's where I'm coming from. I'm used to the most recent version of every piece of software that I use, including the most recent version of dependencies. Now, I don't care that I'm using a version of Kaden Live that is several months old. I don't care. I don't care that I'm using a version of OBS that is several months old, even if there are some things in the newer versions of OBS that I miss. Undo support, for example. It doesn't really bother me all that much. Same thing with Audacity, LibreOffice, Firefox. I don't care that the Firefox version is the ESR version. I don't care. That's not a big deal. What ended up bothering me the most was that some of the dependencies that I use to run some scripts require newer versions of those dependencies than what comes with Debian. So, for example, I have some Python scripts that I use to control things that go on my bar. Now, if you look at my bar right now, you'll notice that there isn't a lot up here. Usually, if you've seen my videos before, I have a ton of stuff up there. I mean, I have scripts for everything. I don't mind a cluttered bar. I like a lot of stuff up there that I can see at a glance. But because the Python version on Debian is so far behind, there are certain Python scripts that just won't run. Now, I haven't actually looked into whether or not I can get a newer version of Python. I'm sure if I switch to the back ports repositories, I could probably get a newer version of Python so that could work. But I haven't looked into it, so that's possible. Another thing is Perl. The Perl version on Debian is pretty old. Or at least it's old enough that it caused the two Perl scripts that I use not to work because they require newer versions of Perl. And I think that that was probably my biggest thing that I had against Debian for a while here is that some of the things that I need just don't work because those dependencies are old. And I've never had that problem on Arch because everything on Arch is bleeding edge. So if you're going to use Debian, you're really going to have to make sure that you don't need that bleeding edge stuff because at least if you're going to be using the stable version of Debian because you're not going to have that stuff and that's going to cause things to break, especially if you rely on scripts like I do. OK, so the next thing I want to talk about is performance. There's not a lot to talk about here. Debian performs just fine. I've done a little bit of gaming on it, not a lot of gaming. Everybody knows I'm not much of a gamer, but Steamstall fine. I played some Orbital Bullet and some Brain Out and some Cities Skylines even. And it works fine. I was getting the same FPS as I was on Arch within a few frames per second. You know, the differences were negligible. I didn't really notice them. So installation of Steam and stuff like that was really easy. I didn't try to install Lutris and I probably should have because the Lutris stuff relies on wine. And a lot of that stuff requires newer versions of wine than what I'm assuming Debian has available. So I don't know how well it would do. And like I said, I'm not much of a gamer. So I know that if you're playing some more recent AAA games that require more experimental versions of Proton chances are that stuff's not going to be available on the stable version of Debian. So Debian may not be the appropriate place for you to do your gaming. In terms of performance outside it, I've never had a single problem with Debian being, you know, slowing down or whatever. There is a stupid bug with this version of Discord. But again, that has nothing to do with Debian because this Discord version is a snap. So in this version of Discord, whatever is it, whenever there's a notification coming in, the whole application just freezes. I don't know why it happened on Arch for a while too when we were on this version of Debian or when we were on this version of Discord. It had the same problem. But because that's the version of Discord, the snap thing provided, I have that bug. The Firefox, for whatever reason, has the same bug. So I don't think it's actually something with Discord or Firefox. I think it has something to do with the notification system that happens in a pilot wind manager, which is probably dunced in this case. So it might be a problem with dunced. I don't know that it's one of the things that I just noticed was that sometimes those two applications when they were sending a notification, they would freeze. So that was a thing. But other than that, I've had no problems with performance at all. The last thing I want to talk about before I jump into a conclusion is some general annoyances. So outside of the application stuff, for whatever reason, some theming things just didn't work. So I installed the Plasma version here on my main machine. And for whatever reason, it also installs like a cute version of LibreOffice. I didn't even know there was a cute version of LibreOffice. I had no clue. And maybe it isn't even a cute version of LibreOffice and it just is broken. But it looks like a cute version of LibreOffice. And when I mean cute, I mean QT, not cute. And it works fine in Plasma. Like you install, you change your theme in Plasma and LibreOffice changes the theme too. It looks nice. It looks like a grubbox theme. And it's awesome. But once I logged out of that session into BSPW, I mean it opened up LibreOffice again. It didn't the theme didn't come across. And that was really annoying because the stock theme is just really bad. I mean, it's just I can I can I can actually show you this right here. This is what the LibreOffice looks like when you're not using Plasma under this certain setup. I don't even changing like installing the QTC5 or whatever software it is. Am I getting that name wrong and changing the theme here, you know, in the in BSPWM doesn't change at all. It doesn't follow the themes here at all. And I've noticed a couple things like that before. So if I go through and open up Alex Appearance and I change the theme, the GTK theme and Alex Appearance Nemo for whatever reason stops following the theme. It's really weird. And Nemo is a GTK app. So that was really, really odd. I don't know what's going on there either. So I've had some racing problems. And as you know, I consider those problems, you know, fatal because if you can't allow me to change the themes of some things, I'm not going to use it. And unfortunately, LibreOffice is a program that I use several hours a day because that's what I do for a living is I write and I edit stuff that other people have written. And if I can't, you know, stomach the look of the software I'm using because I'm, you know, I just can't. This is I mean, this is bubbly that I'm not going to use it. And that's that's a huge problem. I mean, it's kind of a deal breaker, honestly. I mean, it seems like something so stupid to care about, but I do. So that was one of the things that I noticed. So in terms of general annoyances, the old dependencies thing is I just I know I already talked about that, but that was a big thing for me because that means that half the stuff that I have in my bar just can't be used without changing the scripts. I could change those scripts to look for different versions of Python and Pearl, I suppose. But even then some things then just won't work. And that's not a huge, you know, that's a kind of a crappy experience. So bottom line, I don't like Debian, but that's not because of Debian. My experience with Debian has been fine. I don't like their ISO situation. Their website is horrible. They need to fix it. They need to have a list of all their ISOs on one or two pages that you can just go through and download. Even OK, so I'm a big article Linux guy. Now, you know, I prefer Arco over Vinyl Arch for many different reasons. I don't need to go in them into them. But Arco has probably 30 different ISOs, maybe even more. And their website is really very confusing. But all their all their ISOs are in one place. Sure, they have way too many ISOs and they don't do a very good job of describing what each ISO actually does and how it is. It's kind of confusing. But all their ISOs are in one place. And that's the way Debian should be. I mean, that's the way Debian should be. They have to put all their ISOs in one place. And that I think that's my final conclusion for anybody who is looking to switch to Debian. If you've used Linux before and you know what you're getting into, Debian is fine as long as you don't use their website to find their ISO. If you're very, very new and never used Linux before and you expect to be able to go to their website and find the appropriate ISO for your computer, especially if you're installing on a laptop that requires Wi-Fi. Good luck to you because that is just a bad experience. You could probably spend an hour trying to locate the non free ISOs on their website without using Google. So if you are a new user and you want to try out Debian, don't use their website. Just Google it. And I mean, that's that's the response I kept getting from people who when I complained about this was just to Google it. That's not a great solution, but it is the solution. Unfortunately, that's just what you have to do. It wouldn't surprise me that the people who maintained the websites and the isos and stuff had to actually Google it in order to get there to the website because they probably can't navigate it either. That experience colored my entire time with Debian. And it's I mean, it's a weird thing to say, but it's true. Having the problems I did find the appropriate ISO just made me kind of look at Debian much more critically than I would have if it just worked out of the box that first time. If I just if I did that big download button on the homepage, installed it on my laptop and it just worked. I think I would have been vastly more positive on my Debian experience overall, just because I didn't have that initial negative first impression because of trying to find the right ISO. So for me personally, Debian is not for me. And even if I look past the ISO thing, the old packages just won't work for me because I rely on several dependencies that I just can't easily get on the stable version of Debian. Now, if I were trying the unstable version of Debian, I probably would be fine because I'd get more recent hardware. But that wasn't the task. Unfortunately, I would I chose to use the more stable version of Debian. So let me know in the comments below if you use Debian, if you like Debian, if you have any thoughts on this review. This is going to be a pain in the ass for me to edit because I've used a lot of B roll and such like that. So let me know if you enjoyed the way I did it this time. If you have suggestions for how I could do long term reviews in the future, just go and leave those in the comments below. Make sure you hit the like and subscribe button. If you haven't already, I really do truly appreciate everybody who's liked and subscribed all my video, liked and subscribed to all of my videos. The fact that I'm over 4,000 subscribers and I was just completely continues to blow my mind. I don't I mean, it's like it's crazy. There's 4,000 people who want to watch this stuff and it's just it's it's crazy. So thanks everybody who's subscribed, who's watched to the 30 some odd minute point of this video. If you want to follow me, you can do so at the Linuxcast. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast. Before I go, I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons. Devon Chris, East Coast Web. Gento is fun too. Marcus Maiglin, Sven Jackson, Nathan Tule, Joshua Lee, Mitchell, Art Sinner, Merrick Camp and Mr. Fox. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.