My time with Debian
Introduction
Debian was the very first Linux distribution I've ever installed and made use of, all the way back in ~2018. It's the distribution I learned Linux in, installing it on our old family computer back when we still shared one machine.
It is probably the most solid distribution out there, favoring stability over constant updates. Critical vulnerability patches are backported but breaking updates are withheld until the next version of Debian, which is great for servers.
Usage
My usage of Debian went many places, its flexibility, light weight and wide support of different architectures made it an excellent candidate to be installed in every last trashy device I've used:
- The old family computer
- An almost 20-year-old laptop
- My Android tablet
- A Windows 98 computer I salvaged from a classmate
I stil use Debian, on the server VPS that I use to host this website. However, I have not installed it on my current PC, or the laptop that I use. On those devices I use rolling distributions exclusively: openSUSE Tumbleweed and Arch Linux.
Memories
Onto bare metal
I used Debian for a while on virtual machines, trying out Steam and seeing what games of mine would run on Linux natively, that was from a time before Steam Play and Proton, so the only games I could play were ones that had Linux builds.
I decided to install Debian onto the family PC. It was a normal install, with the GNOME desktop environment. I followed all the steps correctly, shrinking the Windows partition before starting the installation, setting up the new partition on the installer and all that good stuff. The Debian installer is quite intuitive if you know how to read. When I finally booted into Debian the first time.... the mouse and keyboard were not working. I rebooted multiple times and nothing changed.
That was nice.
I then reinstalled it following the same process, and then it worked.
To this day I am still impressed by the "plug in, and it works immediately" nature of Wacom devices on Linux. To this day I am still impressed that if you plug a Wacom tablet into a Windows computer, it will not work immediately. It felt like magic that I could just plug my tablet in and be able to draw without having to install anything extra.
School Presentation
Debian was part of a presentation I made when I enrolled in an IT course on the local trade school. The presentation was about operating systems, other students explained all about different versions of Windows, while I was the one who talked about Linux and the Debian distribution in conjunction with one another. The presentation went very well, and I awakened interest and even answered questions the people we had to present to had, despite the fact they were not computer people. It was definitely a nice feeling.
Tinkering
I miss doing the amount of tinkering I used to do back then, with machines that had little to no support to any modern operating system and things that it probably shouldn't be installed to.
The old laptop
My dad had an old Itautec laptop with a 32 bit Celeron processor and 1 GB of RAM. It was not fit for any purpose anymore, and it went back and forth between my dad and I because I found it fun to tinker with. I installed Debian Jessie on it many times, but I also tried some other alternative distributions such as antiX.
It would often run hot, and once I left it on overnight, and it did an emergency shutdown because it had reached over 100ºC.
The older desktop
A colleague from when I was in trade school said she had a very, very old computer she no longer had any use for, and I showed interest, so dad and I dropped by her place and brought the machine back home. That one was a toughie! It wouldn't boot via USB, so I had to pull some trick to even get to the installer, I don't even remember what I did to be honest. I did eventually manage to get Debian Jessie running on it, but it wouldn't run very smoothly at all. For that machine I had found the most stable distribution was Slackware.
That was a pretty noisy machine, and probably something that would feel at home running MS-DOS instead of any Linux. It was still fun to get a relatively modern distribution running on it though.
The Android tablet
I had gotten Debian to run on my rooted Samsung SM-T113NU through the proot method, with the Linux bootstrapper. I had it set up with OpenBox for the graphical environment.
I did a lot of server related stuff with that tablet, accessing it via SSH, setting up Apache, port tunneling, the works! I even used SSH X11 forwarding to run graphical applications on the Windows computer, using the Xming X Server. It was very interesting, and I learned a lot about Linux that way.
Dad-proofing
I'd set up Debian for my dad several times, but he is already too used to Windows to want to use it as anything more than an experiment. He'd asked me several times to install it to a machine of his, just to replace it with Windows again under a week later.
In fact, coincidentally, just as I started writing this article, he asked me about Debian again, and I installed to this one machine he had Windows on, but that kept hitting 100% disk usage while idle. So again I installed Debian for him, this time with KDE Plasma since this is a computer that can actually handle it. After some initial setting up it seems like it's a fairly smooth experience. Hopefully he'll stick with it this time.
Conclusion
Debian is, for me, probably the most important distribution out there. It was my first experience with Linux, and my usage of it was the first time it made me question how computers worked whereas Windows had never sparked any curiosity in me after having used it during most of my life. Nowadays I do not daily drive it, but I still appreciate it from a distance.