Edit: It works! Not beautiful and shows a concerning amount of “Error” lines on startup but it will do. I got VSCodium and ESP-IDF running, at least – and CMake isn’t awfully slow despite it being a crappy 4GB RAM machine (not easily upgradeable). The first boot took a while and I haven’t rebooted since, I guess it will be below 30 seconds next time (Mint on same machine but HDD was about 1 minute).
Edit: I hope I chose the right kernel here, surprisingly not much info online on this! Also, I picked “targeted” because the 10-year-old system does not use any cutting-edge hardware and all drivers should be auto-detected, I think.
After some experience with Linux Mint, I gathered the courage to try another distro. I’d like to turn an old laptop into an IPTV receiver plus FTP/OpenVPN/HomeAssistant server with occasional desktop use. I first installed Windows 11 just in case my family needs to use it (it fucking sucks, the built-in PS/2 keyboard doesn’t work half the time but that’s an issue for later) but now I’ll be turning it into a dual-boot setup with Debian as the primary option. Please give me some encouragement, I’m really afraid of new things.
Old pic: https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/d4bf0222-4fc1-42ab-a3e9-464087dec3af.png
I love Debian. Been using it on my laptop for over a year. Some specific drivers are a little fiddly if you have nvidia graphics but it’s not too bad, lots of good info on the debian wiki.
Damn near every distro is fiddly with Nvidia graphics, they’re practically a criminal cartel, they give Nouveau 0 support (ok fine, lately a bit, but probably not enough)
same here even though i don’t use it much anymore.
for me, it was both the distro that i had used the longest at home due to rock solid stability and it’s become a signal to me that the shop i’m considering working in has rock solid people working on it.
i’m going to miss working on debian in a professional capacity and watching it due it’s thing in real world production capacities for millions of people at a time.
You’ve used Debian for a while? Well, you might know something about one of the problems that were a factor in my hop from Mint: I installed a stable release in 2020 and used the computer as a MMPC every so often, but then I set up a DVI cable to the family Windows PC so the MMPC became redundant, and will be until we switch from satellite to IPTV next year. The computer lay mostly unused for 2 years and then it turned out that it wouldn’t update to a newer, supported release. I gave up troubleshooting that. What kind of distros are most prone to this?