This isn't quite Debian red - more of a mix of reddish pink and purple, which is common in Ubuntu backgrounds.
Despite the Debian logo being red, Debian has tended towards blue-ish backgrounds for several versions.
data1701d
joined 10 months ago
Sad to hear. I don’t know if it’s luck or something else.
I’ve been running Debian on btrfs on my laptop for 3 months without issue; I still use ext4 on my desktop, as I just went with defaults when I installed the operating system.
Based. I find Desert Moonrise kind of vile. I don’t hate painting, but the colors look too Ubuntu.
1: Agree, mostly. I bought a Thinkpad E16 for its Linux support, though I accidentally got a Realtek one that had few bugs that I've since ironed out. My only thought is if you own existing hardware that is still usable, it is worth your time at least trying.
2: I somewhat agree. On my note taking laptop, I go by this philosophy. On my desktop, though, I theme away and still get lots done.
3: I sort of agree with you; I think like you said, if you have one drive for each OS, you won't have problems - dual booting is fine. I've got 2 internal drives in my Thinkpad, though honestly, I hardly use the Windows one. I remember 2 partitions being livable on my Surface Go, but again, I barely touched Windows, so I don't think it had much chance to bork the bootloader.
4: I agree on the Arch and Gentoo part - after trying to use Debian Testing on several laptops, I found rolling release just isn't conducive to a no-frills productivity device. Honestly, though, I don't see that much problem with immutable, especially if you go with Flatpak. I also think any stable distro you like should work so long as it has a backports kernel - I'm using Debian 12 that way on an E16 and it's been pretty smooth (besides the Realtek thing at the beginning, but I fixed that months ago).
5: Wholeheartedly disagree, mostly because XFCE was excluded. 😭 I feel like X11's still not that far off the beaten path. This feeling will probably change when XFCE switches; 4.20 comes out with preliminary support in a few weeks, and my bet is 4.22 in 2026 will have full Wayland support.
6: I don't totally agree with this either. I feel like when it works well natively, go for the native package. If you're having trouble, switch to the Flatpak. I've actually had problems with the VSCodium Flatpak on my laptop not using system environment by default, though there is a fix.
I’ve never used MATE - almost always been an XFCE guy since I got serious about Linux.
It was sort of an accident. After a while of using Ubuntu in a VM (including a weird IceWM stint), I tried installing Debian on an old laptop I had sitting around. The first attempt, where I tried KDE, something went wrong with the Network Manager install. At this point, I can never know what went wrong - it’s been years All I know is that I chose XFCE on the second attempt and didn’t have the problems, likely due to coincidence. Still, I stick with XFCE out of satisfaction.
I mean YaST is kind of snazzy, though not enough to pull me from Debian for the moment.
This distro’s default background isn’t a knockoff of any particular popular non-*nix proprietary operating system’s default background:
Everybody knows glorious leader’s operating system. 😉
Honestly, rather than reinstalling, I’d suggest you boot into a live disk and use dd to copy your old disk over to the new one, then use Gpsrted or something to expand your partition. This worked very well when I upgraded the drives for my Debian install - I think it’s been two years since at thid point without any issues.
If you don’t have an extra drive slot, you might need to get an external adapter.
I like Debian. To save you the misery, though, you should probably just use the OBS Flatpak with it. I used to be a “native” pedant, but these days, I at minimum consider Flatpak a VERY necessary evil, if an evil at all.
Every time I work with a Mac, Hackintosh, etcetera, the 5K upscale of XP Bliss is my default as a joke (except I think near the end of one school year, where I set the background to something from OS 9).
It was even my iPhone background for a while, though right now, it’s a random James Webb image.
Virt Manager GUI is my preferred.