DEBIAN LINUX 12 LXDE | First Impressions & Installation

Debian 12 “Bookworm” was recently released, and there sure does seem to be a lot of hoopla and excitement. I know of a few Ubuntu people that are moving over to it, and when multiple people start making noise like that, I have to take look at well.

My history with previous versions of Debian is not good. Over the years, I’ve tried many Linux distributions, and Debian never made it very high up the list. This is me speaking about it from the perspective of managing several publicly accessible production servers running Ubuntu, although I do have one internal system running Home Assistant on Debian 11. I recently did a blog post about setting up Home Assistant Supervised, and all of the negative things I said involved Debian.

I’m not saying that the decision I made a long time ago to centralize on Ubuntu was the best one, but at the time this was a good fit for my needs. And truthfully I think it still is. But instead of simply dismissing Debian 12 outright, I decided to give it a good look. Besides, as it is getting such positive reviews and I have a somewhat major home server project coming up, I thought I at least needed to revisit it.

THE LIST
I have a quick list of things that I need out of a Linux distribution, based upon either things I have learned or things I’ve needed to support. Here are a few items that are considered critical.

Ease of use. Early on I’d monitor for when new kernels were released and I’d manually patch them from a private branch of the kernel I’d set up where I’d add in my own modifications. These included security patches from other people as well as a few I wrote myself. After one incident where a system got owned (it did involve a fellow NMRC member and their drinking buddy) because I hadn’t found the time to add the latest patch. It took a while, but as Linus Torvalds got better at adding in more security-related patches into the kernel and the whole package manager thing improved, I felt less and less of a need for this level of detail. I mean, it’s hard enough running one’s own email server, let alone managing kernels by hand, and not doing kernel patching freed up tons of time. So it was either going to be RPMs or DEBs, which seemed the easiest route to consider. The more “it just works out of the box” the better.

Desktop and server systems. I considered running one distribution for servers, and one for desktops, but thought it might be easier to simply make it mainly one distribution. I say “mainly” because I knew there could potentially be exceptions to that rule, but I wanted to keep things as consistent as possible. So there should be positive experiences on both platforms. Debian was a bit of a struggle at times, usually because of not running the latest versions of packages like OpenOffice which might have features I needed. I am aware flatpak can solve a lot of these issues, but then again we start to leave that straight-out-of-the box ease-of-use territory.

Getting information. If I needed to do something odd, chances are someone has tried it on Ubuntu and a write-up about it is easily found via search engines. This is invaluable during problem-solving. I had already ran into issues with that during the Home Assistant load where Debian 11 situations weren’t nearly as easy to find, but playing into the “ease of use” angle this idea of being almost instantly find helpful information is hands down an extremely strong item in Ubuntu’s pocket.

Odd things. I have a few odd things I need to support that are deemed game-changers, such as the ability to handle sendmail, nginx, and whatnot, but I also needed to support Duo Security’s Duo for Unix two factor authentication for remote SSH access. Experimentation showed I had less issues with Ubuntu, it fact I had zero issues with Ubuntu. Debian was not without its challenges, mainly the ability to play nice with libpam using Duo for Unix.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

This Is World's First YouTube Channel To Post Raw Video Of Linux Distros And Linux News Without Editing AnyThing ( No Intro, No Outro, No Subscribe, No Like, No Comment, No Share Pop Ups ). Only Subscribe, Like, Comment If You Love It

I Will Post Videos Every day At MONDAY TO WEDNESDAY AT (2 P.M EST) And From THURSDAY TO FRIDAY At (12 P.M EST) And From SATURDAY TO SUNDAY (9 A.M EST) (All times are EST - Eastern Standard Time ):

If you want to give any suggestions regarding videos feel free to comment down below the video.

If you enjoyed the video, you should probably go watch some more!
https://goo.gl/NDp2jy

Thanks for watching! Don't forget to subscribe if you want to see more videos.

Let's keep the comment section fun and amazing for everyone! Be sure to ignore, dislike or flag spam on negative or hateful comments. Lets continue to build an awesome family!

#lxde #debian #debianlinux #debian12 #linux