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dyingkneepad

> leaning towards PopOs since I like Debain support

So why not just Debian?

Most developers I know use either Debian, Fedora or Arch Linux.

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Debain is hard with a capital H.

I'm not too into tweaking my os.

I wouldn't say it's hard - you don't need to tweak anything if you don't want to; one of the features of Debian is that all the packages are configured ready-to-go when you 'apt install' them.

For installation, use a tool like Rufus to make a bootable USB drive.

Use https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current-live/amd64/iso-... - KDE is a desktop environment that will feel pretty familiar if you are used to Windows.

Rebooting into the USB drive, you can try out KDE, or can go straight to the install process - it takes less than half an hour, even as a beginner, and if you don't understand something, just click next and it'll be fine. There's a graphical partitioning tool included in the installer. If you don't need everything to be FOSS, you can select non-free repositories to make some proprietary software easier to install. These aren't officially part of Debian, though, so remember that you can't get support on the Debian forums/chatrooms/bugtracker for proprietary packages.

One more question, what about PPAs ? As far as I can tell alot of Ubuntu software is restricted to these which won't work on base Debian.

Which software do you need from PPA?

At the end of the day, stuff in PPAs is just .deb packages, so it may be possible to just install them in Debian. That said, I've never had to use a PPA in my life, the default Debian archive already has basically everything.

You can add Ubuntu PPAs and install software from them on Debian. Occasionally, the software won't run because it's expecting different versions of its dependencies, but I'd say this is the exception rather than the rule. It's more likely to be an issue with games or specialised scientific tools, whereas development tools probably won't be fussy about which versions they require. And you can always use Ubuntu inside a container (with Podman or Docker), chroot or virtual machine (libvirt or VirtualBox), or even use an alternative package manager like Nix, Spack or Guix on top of Debian!

One final suggestion is to simply look to see if Debian already has a piece of software when people suggest using a PPA. Some developers don't like Debian (for instance because Debian disables tracking code by default) and recommend PPAs when you don't actually need them.

P.S. 'PPA' is a Ubuntu term, while Debian tends refer to 'third-party repositories' instead. Luckily, they are exactly the same thing!

I'm thinking of Steam in particular, but here's a guide for Debain.

https://wiki.debian.org/Steam#Installing_Steam

I think I'm convinced, I'll try Debain and if it doesn't work I can always go back to Mint.

Steam works just fine for me on Debian. The process of installing it is exactly the same as Ubuntu.

I have used Debian for over a decade now. Back then, there was a lot of configuration stuff. These days, barely much - at least on my thinkpad. Everything works out of the box, and software defaults are pretty decent.

Last time I had to play with the system a bit, was when pipewire was introduced, and I had to create a config for it to nicely connect to my bluetooth earphones. I guess that was 3 years ago.

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