A few days with Debian 12...

 I'd like to say it is earth shatteringly wonderful, but it really is just another gnome spin of linux... the satisfaction lies in knowing that the heart is Debian.

I've tweaked the UI a tad, to suit it to my liking.  Otherwise I am still running the gnome desktop.  While steam works very well, I've been struggling with Wine and PlayOnLinux quite a bit.  Can't seem to get it right.

Everything else has been rock solid.

OH!  I did run into the irritating Logitech MX mouse issue.  Freezes up, dies.  Have to reboot to get your mouse back.  I executed the steps that I have always done for Linux Mint or for Ubuntu-based distros to more or less improve upon the mouse-freeze issue, so far it seems to be working.  Not sure whose fault it is:  Linux (drivers/kernel) or Logitech.  Some people think it has something to do with the innate power saving logic of the mouse, others think it is some short-fall of the bluetooth drivers in linux.

But, it has been good so far!  Working as well as Mint for sure.

Change up! Playing with Debian 12

 Mint has been serving me well, of course.  But recently I saw a number of videos singing the praises of Debian 12.  It was "the best version of Debian, ever."

So of course I had to try it.

After several false starts and re-installs, I got it down.  Yeah, the latest version of Debian has a pretty good installer and it now has opened up NON-FREE repos.  AND the even included Nvida drivers!  W00t!1!!

Unfortunately the driver install fails if you try it out of the box because those non-free repos have to be manually added.  AND, if you do not add them while disabling their FREE counterpart it won't work.

I found instructions on the internet but they were mostly wrong, so I went back to the instructions from Debian and did what THEY said, then when I got the error I went to the internet, found one person who stated it plainly what needed to be done, did it, worked.

So now I have my Nvidia drivers!  Next I installed Steam from the repos.  BZZZZT!  It did not work as expected, so I installed flatpak, and in flatpak I installed Steam.  With a little hiccup of having to add access to the non-system disk where I keep my libraries, it worked well.

Finally, I needed to risk having to re-install yet another time :D  so I installed the LTS version of the XANMOD kernel (v3 for my threadripper first gen).  I expected some sort of massive failure but lo and behold (as you can see in the screenshot) it worked!  First try!

So I am running Debian 12.  And, I have to say it is pretty darn good!  I am wondering at this point are Ubuntu-based distros even needed when you can go to the source of Ubuntu, Debian.  I am also wondering how this will change Linux Mint and Ubuntu.

One final note, I went with the GNOME version since I have heard a lot of good reviews of the latest version[s] of gnome, regarding performance and stability.  I did do the "dash to dock" tweak, but other than that it has been solid.  And I do believe it really is pretty performant.  

I have to say though, if Linux Mint LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) is updated to Debian 12, I just might go back.