I'm Leaving Debian (too), BTW

This article is a transcript of a video that you can watch by clicking the thumbnail below. Hence, certain statements may not make sense in this text form, and watching the video instead is recommended.

I recently switched from Arch to Debian and I'm already switching again. It's not like I don't have anything else to do, but here I am trying to create yet another parallel setup for my ThinkPad. Let me explain...

TLDR

If you're looking for a short answer, actually there wasn't anything serious that made me consider moving, at least not as pressing as it was while moving away from Arch.

Now I know there could be some fire in the comments, as apparently the last time I made the switch from Arch, it was pointed out to me that I wasn't worthy of using Arch and I should have gone with Ubuntu.

Anyway, let's make this quick as there are apparently a lot more interesting videos lined up for my new choice of an operating system, which we'll soon talk about.

How operating systems are different to me

To me, the following things make an operating system different than the rest, which obviously may sound very specific to the way I use Linux, and also to my skill level:

• The first, and the most obvious one would be stability, or how much maintenance is required to run it as a daily driver. This again depends on the hardware you're running it on.
• Availability of packages that one uses, which I know could be compiled from source, but let's talk about those that one can install using a package manager.
• The package manager itself, for how easy it is to use, how efficient it is in resolving dependency conflicts, etc. All package managers aren't created equal, and some are definitely better than the others.

My experience with Debian till now

Let's take a moment to acknowledge my positive experience with Debian in the last couple of months.

• Not to my surprise, I've had almost no issues with it yet, even with my Nvidia GTX 1650.
• The packages are older, at times making me miss a few interesting features in the cross-platform software that I have in my workflow and have been using on other machines running other operating systems. A very good example being the recent redesign of Firefox, which though has received polarizing reviews, I sort of like it and have had it on my machine at work that runs Windows.
• Though the installation was a little difficult, once installed, solutions to issues were pretty much easy to find, many times due to similarity with Ubuntu and the massive number of internet posts about it.

But then why am I leaving?

So finally, the reason for me to move out from Debian, there actually isn't much to talk about. I really had to come up with reasons to leave Debian, something that just works and never breaks, or at least according to my experience. Below are a few of them:

• Forgive me for saying this, but Debian doesn't feel like a Linux distribution for enthusiasts. It does work, and one can pretty much achieve a setup they like, but that's just it.
• I couldn't control my curiosity about the other "cooler" stuff out there that I might be missing while using a Linux distribution made for servers. People also suggested not using it as my daily driver.
• I received a lot of comments on my video about leaving Arch, even about how a noob like me was not worthy of using Arch (or even Linux for that matter). But then on the other side, there were quite a lot of helpful pointers for what else I could've gone with instead of choosing Debian.
• I've been missing AUR, at least a little, and though I have access to almost everything that I use, there are a few packages that don't exist for Debian, or I couldn't install using a source compile. I know, I'm the one to blame here, but having a massive collection of packages like the one on AUR cannot be ignored, where you could install pretty much anything you can think of with almost zero effort.

Is this a loop?

So, could this be the distro-hopping syndrome many of us are affected with? Maybe, and my brother would definitely believe so, but looking deep down inside, I realize that's the kind of person I am, so I guess that should be OK. Besides, the grass always appears to be greener on the other side, so there I go again to look for something that I would want to believe is better than what I'm using currently.

Getting to know Linux, one distro at a time

After having a complete setup for my ThinkPad on two totally different Linux distros, which is something that started with Arch, it gave me a fresh perspective to look at Linux and then trying to achieve similar results with Debian helped it improve for me even more. Now I have a better idea of what typical things are required while setting up a Linux distribution, so I guess I can potentially repeat the same steps with a few minor changes for several other distributions and also achieve success.

Up next

As I've kept mentioning that the next one would most probably be Gentoo and also that I don't have all the time in the world to compile packages on my own, and furthermore learn about it, it isn't Gentoo this time either. You can try your guesses in the comments, but I plan to talk about my choice in the next video anyway, so stay tuned!

Outro

That's all that I have for this video, and if you found it helpful, you know what to do. Just be a little kind in the comments. As always, a subscribe will be helpful too. Thanks for watching it till the end, may the maker watch over you, see you in the next video!