Good morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am covering a giant step I’m taking into Linux. Let’s get started!
I’ve known for a while that I would be switching to using Linux on my laptop as part of my program to keep it shambling into the future. The final straw for my laptop was a painfully slow Minecraft experience in Windows. It was giving me between 8 and 15 frames per second on average, but the drops to 0 fps were unacceptable. I started shopping.
Some months ago, I installed Kali on an external drive and ran it live. I had some reservations about how you are logged in as root by default, and even watched a video by Cyber Weapons Lab about things you’d want to do when you install Kali. A more recent major update changed some things to be more friendly towards people looking for a new main OS, but a developer blog explicitly said installation on a production computer is “not recommended.”
I spent a few days considering what distro to go with. There are a number of distro pickers out there that ask you different questions like, “How old is the hardware you want to use?” or, “Do you care if you use closed source drivers?” I am after stability and access to community support. Besides, many knowledgeable Linux experts say that distribution is ultimately irrelevant. YouTuber Chris Titus Tech considers each distribution “a starting point.” While there are fundamental differences between major distributions, you can customize pretty much everything with relative ease once you know what you’re doing.
I only have an idea of what I’m doing. I don’t need bleeding edge for anything I’m doing, nor do I want to have an otherwise stable machine develop problems on me. Debian has a reputation for rock solid stability and enough of a community out there for when issues do develop.
Chris Titus Tech may have had some influence on my decision. He has a series of challenge videos where he covers a year of using Debian on his production machine. One of his warnings is that it takes a week to set everything up before it’s fully stable. I would add the caveat that that only applies after you know what you’re doing. Again, I only have an idea of what I’m doing. As such, I am going into this expecting a month or more. Chris Titus Tech provided a much needed boost here with a video about installing Debian, including how to navigate the list of Debian downloads for an easier ISO to work with. I highly recommend you look it up if you intend to install Debian. LINK.
Considering my aging computer and desire for an easier transition, I chose the MATE desktop environment for being relatively lightweight, yet customizable and went with an ISO that includes “non-free” software, like freely available drivers owned by different companies, for greater compatibility.
I had a few false starts when creating my install media. In my travels, I came across a tool called YUMI (Your Universal Multiboot Installer) LINK. It looks like a good tool to build a replacement for your army of install USB’s or CD’s, but I didn’t get far trying to install Debian on there normally. It’s worth looking into later, though.
If you ever decide to judge a distro by its live session, don’t. Running Debian live from USB is about as sluggish as the Windows OS I’m moving out of. It got so bad that I spent a while asking if an internal HDD or an external SSD on a USB 3 is faster. I couldn’t bring myself to install over Windows when I might be missing some paid license file or something, and the notion of internal partitioning made me nervous. I benchmarked my candidate drives and found the SSD was between two and three times faster than my internal HDD. I installed for performance.
Installation was nerve-wracking. If only I had studied the video I had already had found where someone installed that exact same operating system, I would have known I when the settings were locked in and ready to destroy whatever partition they landed on. I would have known the hard drive selection was almost at the end, and I would have known not to say no when it offered to install GRUB to my master boot record.
I adjusted the BIOS to prefer external USB drives over internal hard disks. Boot continued to a simplistic screen and stayed there indefinitely. I looked into making a Super GRUB disk, but I stopped after two attempts and went with the nuke option and reinstalled, this time following the instructions.
For the record, by the time I hit the ugly mug of the ISO’s login screen, I had a thumb drive for install media and an external SSD with Debian on it.
The following days were a different kind of challenge. The MATE desktop offers enough customizability to almost put Windows to shame. The details would fill up their own post, and there already enough tutorials out there. The only word you need for massively improved searches is panels. You start with one at the top and one at the bottom, but I moved mine around to make like a Start bar across two screens. I’m still working on it, though.
Minecraft was a little tricky to install. I grabbed the .deb file and it wanted a couple dependencies before installing, programs most distros normally come with. Minecraft wanted me to log in again, even after mounting my HDD and copying over my .minecraft folder/directory. Whatever comes next, the improvement in performance is worth it. At the end of my first day on Debian, I was managing between 25 and 40 fps during normal play.
Overall, I think Debian will work out for me in the end. I still have to finish patching it together, but my previous work with Ubuntu and especially Micro Core has prepared me for this overall challenge.
Final Question: What projects have you embarked on that naturally feel like direct sequels to earlier projects?