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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

Install Debian.

Ubuntu feels like the macOS of Linux distros. Debian still feels like... a Linux distro. I haven't used Ubuntu in awhile though maybe I should try again just to compare to my Debian machine.

I switched from Ubuntu 20.04 to Debian 11 at the end of 2022. If you gave me the updated laptop without telling me anything I'm not sure that I'd notice any difference.

How do you handle chromium in Debian stable? It always lags behind significantly behind chromium/chrome releases.

The trick: Don't use Debian Stable, use Testing. Despite it's name compared to "stable", Testing is pretty stable in my experience.

- Chrome Stable - 112.0.5615.137

- Debian Bullseye (stable) - 108.0.5359.94

- Debian Bookworm (testing) - 112.0.5615.49

Most people I know who run Debian for personal desktops uses Testing, not Stable. Vice-versa for servers.

The security repo that is added by default has newer Chromium packages

https://wiki.debian.org/Chromium

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-package/c...

- buster 90.0.4430.212-1~deb10u1

- bullseye 108.0.5359.94-1~deb11u1

- bullseye (security) 112.0.5615.121-1~deb11u1

- bookworm 112.0.5615.49-2

- sid 112.0.5615.138-1

My philosophy has been to let the distro package manager handle system packages (kernel, OpenSSL, etc) but then use flatpak [1] to install user progs like Chromium and VSCode so I get bleeding edge releases and sandboxing.

[1] https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.chromium.Chromium

And by bleeding edge you mean stable.

I use Firefox ESR with Debian stable + backports, and the internet seems to work as far as I can tell (I'm not doing anything fancy with it though)

I use Firefox and I switch to Google Chrome for the very few cases when it's too difficult to make a web site work with Firefox plus all the privacy addons I added to it, maybe not every month.

I think I downloaded the installer from Google and I got this

  deb [arch=amd64] https://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main

in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list now.

Debian doesn't really fill the same niche as Ubuntu desktop. I personally switched to Fedora and I'm quite happy with it.

It is trivially easy to install a DE on Debian.

That said, I'm on Fedora as a daily driver and it's pretty good.

Or run ubuntu as lx-zone on illumos.

That's what i don't get about all the snap complaining. If you know what a snap is, you're already an outlier. If it bothers the user so much, why don't they go straight to the source to begin with (aka Debian)? You can get to the exact same setup.

I haven't tried Debian in a decade or so, in fairness, but it used to be the case that -

a) ubuntu had newer packages

b) ubuntu had a much nicer installer

c) ubuntu had nice defaults/polish on the ui and fonts

Maybe Debian has changed since, but that's why I'd been hesitant to install it in the past.

Ubuntu lts and debian release on pretty comparable cycles, so the newer packages doesn't really hold anymore. Debian installer is pretty straightforward these days imho, but I might be just used to it. Ubuntu has done more customization on the DE compared to pretty much everyone, with Debian you get closer to vanilla gnome experience. This can be seen both as pro and con.

The current stable Debian (11) is two years old. Of course it has older packages than distros released more recently.

Debian 12 is newer than 22.04 right now, and probably about the same as Ubuntu 23.04. It's in hard freeze, and soon to be released though.

The Debian live DVDs are using the Calamares installer now, if that's more your style. Debian's normal installer is still the same as it always was.

Debian is still more default, you set it up for yourself than Ubuntu. I don't like Ubuntu's defaults, but I know what you mean. GNOME's defaults are better now, if that helps out.

For a/ you can use Debian testing and I think it's more or less the same.

For b/ I don't install my OS often enough that it matters that much to me (I think on a laptop I went from Ubuntu 9.04 to 18.04 without ever re installing)

These days I like old and stable and use Debian stable + backport (mostly for kernel) even for desktop, and I'm really happy :)

or use a derivative like popos or mint. that way you get newer packages than debian.

I am interested to see how they will fare in the long term as ubuntu moves farther and farther away from debian though.

Maybe because some of us are actual users of Ubuntu, and have deep workflows based on it, with our personal and work lives dependent on running it.

Switching to a new OS isn’t something that’s either easy or a decision that can be made lightly.

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