Baby's First Debian (...it's me, I'm the baby) - cross-posted from SpaceHey

I've been wanting to get this out for a while, maybe style it up with something custom, but honestly I'm a little busy currently with keeping on top of my WCO roleplays, as well as trying to figure out how to divide up my time so I can participate in ArtFight this year... so here you go, LOL

Weird prologue thing, I dunno... foreword I guess?

I've been wanting to put some Linux distro on my PC for a good while now, and since I'm home from university, I've managed to do just that! I would have also liked to do it on this laptop, but sadly it is a work laptop that must abide by some policies that restrict my OS to Windows 11 Pro... so my home PC is the next best thing! I suspect there's something going on with my graphics card, since I haven't heard it make any noise after installing Debian 13 (Trixie) on that computer, but it's not super important, so I'll deal with it later. If necessary I'll upgrade, because it is quite an old card (and quite loud sometimes) and it seems newer ones tend to have better compatibility (new card work with new OS... duh), but hopefully I can just find some driver that works for it if need be.

I imagine most people who clicked on this blog will know exactly what a Debian or a Linux is, but because I like yapping, you get an explanation. Feel free to just skip this paragraph if you either know what you're doing already or don't care enough to yell at me for small mistakes I make in this explanation as a newbie. So, Linux itself isn't a full operating system, but forms the core parts of one (also called the kernel). Since it's open-source, many different people have managed to take this core part and make new operating systems with it - these are called Linux distributions (abbreviated to distro). These distros can vary in their target audience, with some being general-purpose (e.g. Ubuntu and one of its derivatives Mint), and some being more specialised (e.g. Kali for ultimate hackerman, or Gentoo if hating your life is your pastime), and naturally, some are much easier to use than others. For example, Mint is generally recommended as a good beginner distro, whereas Arch (I don't use arch btw) is much more of a DIY distro and requires a lot of knowledge and patience in the field of dependencies, daemons and the like... I think. There's also distro forks and derivatives, where someone will take a pre-existing distro and make some tweaks to it, e.g. Mint is a derivative of Ubuntu, and Devuan is a fork of Debian.

Choosing a Distro

Okay, now that's out of the way... how I settled on Debian and escaped the dreadful choice paralysis I was in. I initially thought to just try out Mint Xfce because of how it was touted as the ultimate Windows-to-Linux newbie OS, but in all honesty I didn't want to be coddled too much, especially not after one of my Computer Science modules had us doing (very basic) Linux terminal commands. I was intrigued by Slackware, which I came across repeatedly in my search, but it is far too advanced for someone like me... at least for now. I think part of the reason why I bumped into people mentioning Slackware so much is because 1) The developers specifically stated they would not implement any form of age verification should the California and Colorado laws pass, and 2) In my travels across the internet, I stumbled across the systemd debate. From what I gather it started off as just an init system that helped boot things in the right order more easily, but has now branched out to do a plethora of other things, but I could be horribly wrong. In the end I decided to skip any systemd-less distros for the time being, while I figure out more about systemd itself and what it does and how I can do it myself... maybe I'll dual-boot Debian and Devuan once I feel confident enough, who knows. But for now, I don't want to dive too deep into the trenches, so I settled with Debian in the end due to its stability, its widespread usage in servers, and the fact that was the distro we used in that one CS module.

Preparation and Installation

Because I've been off for study reasons, my desktop PC hadn't been booted up (using my SSD, at least - one of my brothers babysat it) in basically 2 years, and I unearthed some old stuff I wanted to keep, with some being important documents, and others... not so important. Admittedly, it took a lot longer than I anticipated to get everything transferred to my laptop, mainly because of 2022-2023 recordings of the Bendy games, but I got there in the end. Rufus (utility that helps make bootable USB drives) had a bit of a crashout with the ISO image, and pretty much froze multiple times. I suspect that was because I chose the full DVD image with all necessary packages and programs on it already, rather than one of the netinstall options, so it ended up being about 3.7GB in size. I am glad I chose a complete image over a netinstall one, though; it meant I didn't have to do any funny network shenanigans while installing, and I wouldn't be dependent on masses of files being transferred over the internet simultaneously, causing slowdowns.

I think I probably should have consulted the quite thorough Debian installation guide a lot more than I did (I didn't even consider touching it), but thankfully I managed to get it all sorted first try, minus one hiccup; I couldn't quite figure out how to properly set up the network mirroring the installer prompted me for. I very quickly found out, however (a.k.a the installer told me), that this wasn't necessary for DVD installation images, and all it would provide was the ability to install upgraded versions of software - and because I could upgrade and reinstall whatever programs anyway, I just left it as-is. I think somehow I managed to get into the manual installer... I don't remember what it was I pressed, but hey, I managed to see everything that was happening, so that was cool.

Booting Up and Noob Problems

I lied. There was one other hiccup in the installation process. Apparently, at some point during the installation of Debian, they prompt you to either create a root password or add a new user... I never actually went through that option, so of course when the login screen showed up, I couldn't log in. Thankfully, all I had to do was access the GRUB bootloader (which opens automatically upon bootup), append init=/bin/bash/ to the linux line to boot into the shell, and create a new user with adduser. I made the account, set the password, gave myself sudo permissions, and successfully logged in.

Once I had completed the little tour provided, I decided it would be worth trying to install something using the terminal. This was in part due to the fact I had chosen MATE as my desktop environment during installation, but it chose to stick with the default GNOME - it probably needed network mirroring, but I already knew I could install different DEs from the terminal, so I didn't mind so much. First of all, I decided to download Strawberry Music Player, which was recommended to me by a guy on a WhatsApp group chat. Alas, I attempted to, and it came up with multiple dependencies that were both missing and not installable. I tried a couple of other things, but apt just could NOT find any packages whatsoever. Eventually I sudo -S'ed my way to /etc/apt/sources.list, and discovered the file was devoid of anything of value, other than a couple of comments. I tried to insert a couple of links into sources.list, but it didn't work, and unfortunately the Debian installation and setup guide didn't say anything on the matter, other than needing to configure apt... it took embarrassingly long time to figure out all I had to enter was "sudo apt upgrade" to update the repository information. After that, everything went swimmingly: I got Strawberry Music Player, MATE, and Wine and Flatpak for good measure, and ran sudo apt upgrade just in case.

The End I guess

...lol that's pretty much it, obviously it's still early days (and I still need to check if my graphics card is recognised by the system) but I'm very glad I've managed to get this far - and that I didn't allow myself to be coddled too much with Mint. One of my younger siblings came up to me and asked "What's wrong with your computer?" when the screen looked like this:

I don't remember what I said in reply, but I just thought I'd bring it up because it was quite funny. Anyways, that's it from me, God bless, and may you survive the heat of this summer! Unless if you're from the southern hemisphere, in which case may you survive the cold of this winter!

~ December Winterwolf