It’s basically an extra layer of polish to make Debian as user-friendly as can be, which while being very pleasant to work with for experienced users, is likely to be particularly appreciated by those who are not particularly technically inclined. As an example, the Mint Software Store is pretty much unmatched as a stable, and extremely user friendly way to manage and install software, with reviews, Flathub integration, screenshots, etc. Where as on standard Debian, the GUI package manager would likely be Aptitude, which is quite a daunting piece of software for the uninitiated.
You could make a vanilla Debian install as user friendly as Mint, but you’d already have to have the skill to get it to that state, where as Mint is ready out of the box.
LMDE essentially is Debian (uses the Debian repos for most of its installed packages), with some Mint packages included on top via the Mint repositories that are also added. Mint actually has some pretty neat graphical utilities and has Flathub configured to work by default with the Software Center.
The real benefit though is if you enjoy using the Cinnamon DE. The latest Cinnamon version is kept up-to-date in LMDE as the Mint team backport it. The Cinnamon version in Debian 12 is fixed and will not get major version updates until the next version of Debian.
As a Debian user myself, I enjoy Mint when I wish to use Debian on the desktop. I only use core Debian for servers.
Thanks for the good explanation, makes sense.
I’ve been using Debian for both servers and desktop for some while, and tbh getting DE updates earlier would be nice without going unstable - but not nice enough to start tinkering around and potentially compromising the stability so I get it
Not sure you saw my edit, but I’ve been using a Dell Latitude 7490 for years and its been perfectly fine, so the issues you’re experiencing aren’t normal. Something is definitely up with your specific laptop. Just mentioning to help you narrow down issues.
The Linux Experiment covered Asahi (I believe it was Debian) and he said he’ll review the Fedora’s version too. It was a month or two ago and there were some things still in the works. But as a Fedora user and it being Asahi’s flagship which has been fine tuned according to them, I’d bet Nick will post a video soon. If you’re an early adopter, I’d say give Fedora a go now, otherwise just wait for Nick to cover it in his usual detail on his channel. Nick’s the man and will cover it very well. This will probably be the best conformation unless an early adopteradopter or Dev can chime in here.
Vanilla OS. I loved the idea of having access to so many packaging formats and package managers at my fingertips but maintaining the system, managing everything and keeping in mind all the things that I’m doing was just too much work for me when I just wanted a system that I can use without any hassle. I know immutable distros are quite the buzz these days but it just isn’t for me. That was also the time when I was trying to find an Ubuntu based vanilla GNOME distro
iirc the devs have added Disk Encryption support and it’ll ship in the next release (Orchid). I can imagine how confusing and frustrating that must’ve been!
Maybe I’ll give Vanilla OS another try when Orchid releases
I’ve installed Asahi Fedora remix on my 2021 M1 last week. Most things works fine now: speakers, HDMi (no video output with usbc yet), wifi, bluetooth, etc. It comes with KDE, it’s great but requires a lot of tweaks compare to Gnome imo. Overall it’s really stable, install was easy, and switching from MacOs to Linux is a little long but works fine. For me, the only issue so far is that it cant fully use the power of the GPU. I got a 32 core GPU so video editing is crazy fast on macOS. I know they are working on updating the driver. If I could get like 80% of the power I get on macOs, I probably would be using Linux 95% of the time.
I used to take the long route of physically disconnecting the drive with windows when installing a Linux partition until I realized there wasn’t anything of use for me in windows, so I backed up some documents and removed windows completely from my desktop.
A software approach to a hardware problem is an exercise in futility.
Test your memory with Memtest86
Test your disks too. badblocks is a Linux utility. I like the Victoria and HDDScan Windows programs because they’re less pass/fail in their reporting - you can see that a disk is degraded even if all of the sectors technically respond.
Memory is fine. I ran a couple disk checks as well and it’s also fine. I was also using two SSDs during the process with no difference in the problems experiences.
its easy for you because you been playing around with Linux, I tried to install SSH on zorin os. But after installing SSH , it needs to be restarted, when tried to do that , it won’t saying the ash server did not start, A simple thing like this is have me stumped in Linux where as in windows it was just installing putty and done.
I mean for most Linux derivatives, getting SSH setup for outgoing connections is usually install the openssh package from your distros repos, though I imagine many preinstall it, no reboot should be necessary, and you just type ssh user@hostname into a terminal to connect to the remote ssh server to access stuff on that computer. There shouldn’t be a need to reboot for installing app that’s not a service.
Wanting to enable ssh access to the computer you are using so a remote client can connect to it? Well the same openssh package should have come with sshd which acts as the server to allow remote ssh client to connect. It’d probably need enabling (so it’s run automatically on boot) and starting (so you don’t have to reboot to have it going), on distributions using systemd that’s usually just systemctl enable sshd.service (which makes sure the sshd daemon will be started on next boot) followed by systemctl start sshd.service to start it immediately so it’s running straight away, (or systemctl enable sshd.service --now to roll both steps into one).
Over the years I have tried most mainstream distros. I have never seen a reason to use anything other than Debian. Never had it break due to upgrading, I have never tried Nix, Alpine, Gentoo, or Slackware, not many other others I haven’t tried since I started using Linux in 2000.
I don’t currently use it as a daily driver, but I tried. The basic, core experience is fine. Depending on what you need, it could be great. In the end I went back to using macOS (though I did ask myself what was working so well for me with GNOME that I wanted to try the experiment to begin with, and that has resulted in a leaner, simpler macOS setup).
The stoppers for me were webcam support (it kind of worked, but with bad image quality issues), and a number of Flatpaks quietly failing at launch. Non-stoppers but papercuts included that you can find ARM packages for some things but they’re direct downloads instead of dnf sources you can set up (e.g. 1Password, Sublime Text), and there are a few weird glitches with some fonts that work fine on x86 setups.
It’s trivial to set up dual-boot, and pretty easy to back out if it doesn’t work for you, provided you read a few paragraphs of documentation. I’ve done it twice on two different machines.
Keep in mind that asahi cut out X11 support and went straight for wayland. It can support xwayland, just know that some things may or may not play nicely if the software doesn’t support wayland. As Wayland is the future of compositors, most popular Linux software should support it eventually.
Linux on arm is good, however as it is not nearly as popular in the desktop space as x86, common binaries for certain applications may not exist on arm if it closed source. You may or may not need those, you can make that judgement call.
Battery life is better than I expected but still not nearly as good as Macos. At least until they can come up with a proper solution for low power usage. Which currently a logistical problem of making something Linux kernel upstream compatible instead of applying a functional dirty solution now.
Linux on M1 is noticeably snappier than anything else I have ever used. It has a great future ahead of it. If your workloads don’t rely on heavy gpu usage and all your software can be found or compiled there. It is a pleasant experience. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask. I think some of the other users talked about the common things well enough.
Also yes, dual booting is currently the only supported option. They still need macos for firmware upgrades.
fwiw I’ve been on Wayland for a few years now and the amount of times I’ve had to think “oh, I’m on Wayland” are in the single digits. not to pretend it you don’t run into things you have to solve or alternatives you have to find, you definitely do, but I’ve been very happy especially over the last year or so.
I do not use asahi though so I can’t comment on that specifically.
I am new to Wayland, but on asahi it is mandatory. So I am having to get used to it. Which is more noticeable as I had to change from i3 to sway. They are functionally identical but different in how you configure it with the wayland compositor.
yes, I’m using sway as well. i was lucky that my old i3 config mostly worked without modification, although it took a while to find good replacements for many of the little apps I’d come to rely on. I settled on bemenu, waybar, and then a dozen little glue apps like clipboard managers eventually fell into place. the archlinux wiki pages on sway and wayland are a great resource.
Ubuntu. I initially downloaded it for my sibling’s pc but now that I’ve downloaded and configured all these things on their computer, I don’t want to reinstall a new OS and reconfigure and download everything again.
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