Why switch?
I played with the idea of switching for quite a while. Having switched my daily driver from Windows maybe 6-9 Months ago I made many mistakes in the meantime.
Good and bad
This may have led to a diminshed experience with ubuntu but all in all, I was very pleased to see that Linux works as a daily driver. Still, I was unhappy with the kind of dumbed down gnome experience.
Problems
There were errors neither I nor people I asked could fix and the snap situation on ubuntu (just the fact that they’re proprietary, nothing else).
Installation
Installing debian (and kde) was easier and harder than I expected. The download mirror I used must not have been great although its very close to my location because it took ages although my internet connections is good.
Apps
Since I switched to Linux, I toned down my app diet a lot. Installing all my apps from ubuntu was as easy as writing a short list and going through discover. Later I added flatpak which gave me a couple apps not available through discover (such as fluffychat). The last two I copied directly as appimages.
Games
I was scared that the „old kernel“ of stable debian would be a problem. As it turns out, everthing works great so far, a lot better than on ubuntu which might or might not be my fault.
Instability
Kde does have some quirks that irritate me a bit like installing timeshift (because I tried network backups which dont work with it and the native backup solution does not seem to accept my sambashare) led to a window I could only close by rebooting.
Boot time
What does feel a bit odd is the boot process. After my bios splash, it shows „welcome to grub“ and then switches to the debian start menu for 3 seconds or so, then shows some terminal stuff and then starts kde splash and then login. This feels a lot longer than ubuntu did. Its probably easy to change in some config but its also something that should be obvious.
Summary
So far I‘m incredibly happy although I ran into initramfs already probably because of timeshift which I threw out again. I might do a manual backup if nothing else works. My games dont freeze or stutter which is nice. All apps I had on ubuntu now work on debian and no snaps at all.
TL;DR: If you feel adventurous, debian and kde are a pretty awesome mix and rid you of the proprietary ubuntu snap store. It also doesnt tell you that you can get security upgrades if you subscribe to ubuntu pro. Works the same if not better.
Ubuntu is a great gateway distro. When I dumped Windows back in the Windows 10 days, Ubuntu made it an easy transition, time elapsed and there were things that didn't work right that I found frustrating. I eventually ended up trying out Fedora and the rest was history. I'm glad you found a good fit for you.
These days, Linux mint should be recommended for people coming from windows. I rate their desktop environment and intuitive style better and faster understandable for people coming from windows compared to ubuntu. If a person always wants the newest stuff recommend OpenSuse Tumbleweed now, since it a is rolling distro but very stable and you don’t have to use Terminal at all, there.
I can see why you would recommend it. For me though, it's too close to the Windows UX. I try and make people break away from what they know in order to have the cleanest transition.
I just put the taskbar on left side now it looks more like ubuntu. I don't see anything that makes mint look like windows except the "start menu" position. Its all GTK afterall
If you put it on the top, remove all app icons and add a second bar on the bottom that shows the apps and hides when you open a window in full screen mode, it even gets a macOS feeling out of the box without any addons.
I tried KDE, Gnome, xfce and experimented with tiling window managers. At the end of the day I’m always getting back to cinnamon. It just works for me and I love it 😍
Glad to see someone do the thing I do, by NOT recommending Mint to newcomers from Windows paradigm. Ubuntu forces people to see GNOME's superior workflow and rethink the fact that Windows may not be all that good, and was only good because they only ever used Windows. No, Start menu paradigm is not the best thing since sliced bread.
Exactly this. I actually thought Windows was going to do something radical when they dumped the start menu, but people hate change and so they were forced to bring it back
People do not realise the biggest thing people liked in Windows was the Fisher Price skin on XP. The second most liked thing was Aero glass theming in Vista/7. People like Windows because of visual effects nostalgia and the whole backwards compatibility thing, being able to run ancient W98 software on W10.
Those visual effect things can be replicated on Linux easily.
It's funny because I always thought I would go full unixporn and when I finally got to Linux, I was so happy with how it looked, I never got around to looking into things like Sway properly.
Have a look at my "dreaded GNOME" Debian setup, that takes less than 30 minutes and no config file text editing and all that unixporn gymnastics.
I have the density of Full HD in 1366x768 here.
You have no idea how many times I keep coming back to this. That font is gorgeous. Truth be told, that's a very solid set-up.
Installed and setup Debian 12 Stable as dual boot on a family desktop with i3 2nd gen, might require 4 GB more RAM. Playing Megadeth on Spotify in Firefox nicely. I replicated my theming, fonts and tweaking in more or less under 30 minutes, all with mouse clicks.
Has Windows 7 as main OS for legacy hardware, works perfectly, runs old software well.
How often are you jumping back to Windows?
I would say about 10-20%. Easier time dealing with curating and sorting archived videos and files, easier time with some software, and when I just need to use web browser without timeout errors. It is a good balance, and I believe I should not fight the tools with ideology. OSes are tools, and pick the right tool for right job at right time.
Absolutely agree with that.
I agree. It was a good gateway for me as well. We will see if debian is the end but so far it looks promising.
One thing I do find odd in my linux experience is that I find myself wanting to track down every last bug in my system (fruitless most likely). It has bothered me in ubuntu and now with debian I also want pretty much no warnings in my syslog if possible. We‘ll see if that works.
The fact that you report bugs you find makes you nothing short of a legend.
Thank you very much. This made me smile. Being kind to others makes you the same btw. :)
Many of my graphic applications spit out warnings on terminal about dbus not responding, because it never runs, neither do logind, but everything works for me. I don't pay attention!
@haui_lemmy @sabreW4K3
Devils advocate here, but what makes Ubuntu a great gateway distro nowadays?
When Ubuntu came out it had a graphical installer and UI improvements allowed users to do more without the terminal. I feel like at some point other distros caught up and Unity was the unique selling point. Then canonical became more focused on the server and killed Unity. I am not sure what is the selling point of Ubuntu as a desktop in 2024.
This all comes from my personal experience of Ubuntu being my main distro for 10+ years. But when I started distro hoping I realized there wasn’t much difference between Ubuntu and other distros nowadays.
It still has FAT32 support. I think that's the last thing.
It used to be at least, but I'm not so sure that it still is. I've been using Linux full time for over a decade, mostly Xubuntu but also other distros and vanilla Ubuntu. Last year my wife decided that she wanted to ditch Windows for good so we installed Xubuntu on her pc, her netbook and our new htpc, and I was surprised that we ran into so many different issues. I could solve some of them but I think it would be much more difficult for a first time Linux user, and potentially give them a bad first impression of Linux OS:es.
What kind of issues did you run into if you don't mind me asking? I jumped ship from Ubuntu just when they started with the snap nonsense, so things I found egregious, like them dropping Unity, aren't really valid in the grand scheme of things.
Small disclaimer: I'm not claiming all these issues can be said to be 100% Ubuntu's fault, but if recommending a distro to someone who wants to try Linux for the first time they probably won't care about anything other than the compound experience. I used Xubuntu for many years and remembered it as very stable and the vast majority of things being easy and working out of the box, which is why I was so surprised that I had to spend hours troubleshooting various things that I never had problems with previously.
Some issues and annoyances I remember off the top of my head:
Unable to wake computer after monitor turning off due to inactivity. Happened to all 3 computers which have very different hardware, which seemed a little strange to me. Did some troubleshooting on my wife's desktop PC and IIRC it appeared to be the program which would ask for your password crashed, causing the computer to turn off the monitor signal again. Uninstalled the xfce4-screensaver package and disabled password on resume on her PC which fixed it there, but her netbook needs to have password and I think it still sometimes has this issue (she doesn't use it very often). On the htpc I both uninstalled xfce4-screensaver and disabled all monitor power saving, but recently it has started turning off the monitor signal after inactivity anyway. At least it always wakes up from this state.
However, the htpc sometimes fails to wake up the monitor/tv after hibernate. The computer wakes up but the monitor doesn't, and the only solution I know is the following procedure: Wake the computer up, press ctrl-alt-f1 to switch to a different vtty, press the keyboard shortcut to hibernate the computer, wake it up again, press ctrl-alt-f6 to switch back to the graphical desktop. For some reason that works..
Every time the htpc wakes up from hibernate there's a notification saying something about the computer being reconnected to the network. There's a button on the popup for "don't notify me about this again" but it makes no difference, the popups keep coming. Can ofc. be disabled entirely from some other settings, but it's not working as expected.
Watching movies in Kodi doesn't work. It starts playing it without sound, then it begins to stutter after about 10 seconds and it gets worse until Kodi freezes entirely. Haven't had time to properly debug it, but it worked just fine on Arch (which I wouldn't recommend to a beginner for other reasons :)) which the previous htpc had. Instead we use VLC for the time being.
We watch various series on youtube and dropout.tv so we have a browser tab permanently open for each, often with longer episodes paused in the middle. About once per month there's a popup telling us that we must close the web browser so that snap can update it. The popups don't time out, and need to be clicked to go away. If you click to ignore it too many times it will forcibly close eventually. Occasionally this causes the web sites to forget what we were watching, and it can take a bit of time to find out where you were in a 3 hour D&D actual play. Probably snaps working as intended but both of us find it annoying.
Over all our Brother laser jet + scanner is great with Linux, but I had to spend a few hours to get all features working on my wife's PC while it was pretty much plug-n-play on my current install of Fedora KDE.
Wife's PC had issues with monitors losing their relative position and orientation. It might've been triggered when one of the cables glitched a bit, and it doesn't happen now that they're screwed in properly, but I think the OS ought to remember the configuration better. It also moved the monitors so they weren't adjacent, which made the mouse pointer behave very weirdly when moved between then until she rearranged them in the settings.
There were some other things that I'm not able to recall right now too, nothing too serious for someone with Linux experience. My wife used Ubuntu at university so she's not computer illiterate, but I don't think she would've had the time and energy to spend hours troubleshooting issues, searching online and digging around in config files, so she probably would've switched back to Windows since it mostly worked for her.
Bloody hell, that's a tremendous post. Thanks for taking the time to write it.
I can totally see why anyone would abandon Linux with those problems. But at least now we all know just to send you round if anyone is having problems 😏
Fortunately I dislike Windows so much that I'm willing to spend a few weekends helping someone switch to Linux, especially if it's my wife :D I'm also realizing I might've skipped a step in the conversation since the person I replied to was talking about Ubuntu, and it's possible that at least some of those problems were specific to Xfce. In my mind I reasoned "I used to think that Xubuntu would be a solid recommendation for a beginner since I had a good experience with it in the past", and it sounded like others were saying similar things about Ubuntu. Since I discovered that Xubuntu now had a lot of non-trivial issues I had to deal with, I was kind of thinking that it might be the same for vanilla Ubuntu.. Or not, it might still be easy to use and a plug-n-play experience for beginners :)
Even if it can't be proven that some of the problems were stock Ubuntu's fault, I would still like to blame Ubuntu because they do some really dodgy things. Like the second dock 😒 it seems so trivial, but why wouldn't they remove the old dock first. Decisions like that tell me other things won't be right
Things have changed since those days fam. For example, if you install Steam on Ubuntu (snaps) today it's highly likely to break. If you want a solid Ubuntu recommendation go with the downstreams: Mint, PopOS, etc.
I would argue that no one should install any snaps.