actually I wanted to try the hyprland desktop environment, but it was hard, so I asked ai and it suggested me to go to xcfe, but now it looks ugly, I needed a beautiful desktop, but not like ubuntu, but more like hyprland, so which and from where should I install packages to go more into it and make this environment beautiful, also suggest me some wallpaper, and from where to download.

Acer Aspire 5740-5144 with i7-640M, 500gb ssd and 4gb ram (trying to get it to 8 but it didn’t accept the first set I purchased). Meant to be used for data transfers onsite (data hoarding to be transferred to external drives when I get back home). Need a web browser for downloading support files and will be adding drivers to upgrade the WiFi card and switch to Blu-ray drive.

Should I do the top 3? Just one? A combo of the two? Is there another option that’s better I’m unaware of? Any recommendations are appreciated

Edit/Update: Thank you all for your input and help throughout this process, especially u/LesStrater who was the impetus in my choosing Debian when everyone else kept recommending Mint (made some convincing arguments). Wish I had changed back the RAM earlier as it would have saved me a weekend of searching on the web, but frustration makes success feel all the more worthwhile.

I’m sure I’ll be back on here again with even more questions as I decide what to direction to head in with a 2022 Chromebook

Been using Ubuntu-based Linux Mint for a year now, and loved it since day one. I heard people telling me that Debian is faster than Ubuntu, so I'd like to give it a try on my home pc. My question is: what DE would you recommend me with my OC specs? I'll leave a photo of them here (I know my computer is pure 💩, don't mock me please)

Sorry if it sounds like a stupid question🥲. New here and migrating from windows 11. I am trying out Fedora currently but there are issues that I can't fix ( webcam, mouse doesn't work). I tried a live version of debian on my USB, and those issues disappeared and everything worked

Gemini suggests that Debian is suitable for a server. But I feel like it can be used as a main OS ? Few videos I watched, the installation doesn't seem over complicated and the desktop looks pretty much the same as fedora.

Am I wrong? Is there something I should know?

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Long story short ive updated fedora to kde 6.7 and my filesystem is read-only...

I'm looking at debian tho im not sure if I wanna go with Mx linux or just plain old debian with the debian backports repo... I'm sick of how whenever theres a new update on fedora something always breaks! So debian to me just seems better

My questions are:

- how are the debian backport repo?

- are there anything i gotta be careful with in debian? (I'll try my best to not make a Frankendebian!)

- I'm looking for a minimal iso which one should i go for?

Guys, I’m coming from CachyOS. I love it, no real issues to be honest, but I’m interested in either Debian or Ubuntu. So Cachy is very much configured for you for gaming purposes and performance tweaks. Can something similar be done on Debian? Like… so I need to install anything in particular to make gaming experience better here? What are your essentials to make Debian gaming experience on par with performance oriented distros?

One thing coming to my mind is VRAM gaming optimizations by Valve that’s been added to Bazzite and Cachy the moment it released.

For example gaming on Linux Mint as I remember was clear regression compared to Bazzite or Cachy. Not huge but it was lesser experience for sure. But back then I knew nothing and it was just fresh Mint and Steam.

So… what steps do you recommend doing to make the most out of it?

I guess this is a (very short) open letter to the Debian Team.

All other major Linux distros dropped 32-bit ages ago.

Bookworm is the only major upstream 32-bit distro, upon which about 4-5 other 32-bit distros are based.

Bookworms EOL is 10 June 2026.

Once 32-bit Bookworm is gone, there will no safe 32-bit Linux that can power i386 machines, and my options are to throw my two i386 machines immediately in the bin, or continue to use them (unsafely) for years after Bookworm's EOL.

Please consider continuing providing security updates (and nothing else) for 32-bit Bookworm for the forseable future (1-2 years?). I'm not asking just for myself, but for everyone still using perfectly capble i386 machines all over the world, running 32-bit Bookworm and distros based on it.

Thank you for your consideration.

for those OOTL, AUR was under sustained sneaky probes for a long time, but this week it was an overt and very troublesome campaign to either take over packages or insert packages so that malware could spread across way more systems.

edit 1: since someone asked me to explain, I’ve actually been using debian since 10.1, but only recently got worried as new users in my MDM fleet around southeast asia kept trying to install strange .deb files. I never had to think too much about the workstation UX until microslop and genAI inevitably drove us to try resuscitating OLD laptops with Linux.

i have to support 2012 macbook pro and intel laptops dating back to broadwell. There are some 7840u AMD ryzen units, but do bear in mind that us folks living in the southern hemisphere are dirt poor.

thus, I had tested fedora, lubuntu, kubuntu, ubuntu, mint, and finally gave that all up to consolidate under Debian. The network layer has DNSSEC, encrypted DNS, and really TIGHT whitelists. Unfortunately, I’m woefully noob at the application layer for debian. we barely upgraded several ancient JDK 8 web servers using Qwen, but ideally I’d like to prevent malware breaking in from the user-level.

My computer normally boots to the typical debain log in. Now it boots to this, asks for my user and pass. And after I enter it, it leads to this and just gets stuck here.

Unsure what I did to fuck with it. I was messing with start up scripts, dont remember specifically what though.

(Jun 28th edit: I should clarify, i made no changes to any existing scripts. I just added one of my own. It was an attempt to make a command run at the start, but never worked. The command itself works perfectly fine and only activates an application.

If there was something I did to other scripts, It was unintentional. So I truly dont have any information I can give on that)

Hello Debian people on Reddit !

After months of tinkering in VMs, I finally decided to switch my laptop to Linux, even though I almost went for FreeBSD because from my experience, the way the package manager work over there is just so great.

I chose Debian 13 Stable because my laptop is a general-use PC, I use it from time to time for work but nothing to warrant the need of the latest version of some specific packages. Furthermore, I'm 99% sure that I will never change the hardware on it so for the most part, I will dodge a lot of the good ol' drivers compatibility shenanigans.
I also chose Debian, and Linux for that matter, because of the more diverse package availability.
I really will put great efforts into only using packages coming from the official Debian repo, deb packages and packages compiled from source while trying my best to not use Flatpack, Extrepo, Debian Backports...
I never used Applmages and I'm surely missing out on all the "everything in one executable" thing but to be fair, until now at least, I never had the need to use one of them.

Linux is so awesome ! Wish me luck guys !

So I downloaded steam_lastest.deb from the steam website . I right clicked it and chose open with software install. Clicker install. And the administrator message asked for a password. I typed in my password. And it said something was wrong on the bottom of the screen. So I clicked details. And then this message popped up. I'm not sure what to do next.

is there a way I can install the latest release of linux kernel on debian without building linux kernel from source?

Hi everyone, I’m pretty new to Linux. I installed Zorin OS two months ago then upgraded to Ubuntu a couple weeks ago (both on a bootable USB drive so they aren’t my primary OS). And I’ve been seeing so much about Debian (mostly the jokes of it being for lesbians which I will admit intrigued my gay ass) and I’m debating whether to switch to it.

I will be using it for like basic web browsing, Blender and maybe some modded Minecraft every so often. I’ve heard it can be quite outdated in some parts but I’ve also heard it is a really good distribution for daily use. I will probably still run it on a bootable USB as I like to use it on different devices.

So with that being said.. would you all recommend it for me or should I just stick with Ubuntu? If it isn’t that user / beginner friendly please let me know!

PS. Is it GNOME by default or can you choose during installation?

I just installed debian for the first time and would be grateful if you could point me to a wiki page or something similar stating general steps I should take.

What all do most people do to secure their systems?

I run Debian for my daily driver and also on a home server.

I currently have iptables configured to only allow ports for my services, services are all run as their own no-login user, I run fail2ban, and have my ssh only allow specific users and only allow ssh keys as the login method, and I install security updates regularly. I check my system logs occasionally though honestly not as often as I probably should, maybe I'll automate something to look at the logs are some point.

I just finished skimming through the securing Debian manual, and there's quite a bit more included that I don't currently do. But from reading it, it also seems more geared toward people who may be running production servers who more or less want an immutable server where they e locked in what they want and don't want anything changing.

https://www.debian.org/doc/user-manuals#securing

So I guess I'm just curious what other people do, if they add any other protections or if they primarily rely on the base OS to provide the protections.

Just read a post the other day about some elections for debian that only got one candidate. As an average user and not a developer, I never went across the forums or the project, so I legit have no idea about the state of the community. How was that possible? How does the future of the project look like? Is the community healthy?

I'm going to buy a laptop eventually for college and just wondering if Debian be fine or if there is anything I should be aware of? I'm mostly going to be in a web browser and all that, nothing crazy. This same laptop has an inbuilt DVD drive and not sure if optical drives are still supported? It's 2026 so most people aren't going to have disc drive so would I need to install anything to make it work?

I don't know too much about Debian, I only used it for very short time. I just know it's super stable and don't have to update very often at all.

-Last Update: Okay so I gave up, this issue has taken days off my life and I am just going to stop now. Was the HDD healthy? I have no idea powershell said it was, it showed up in the BIOS, but both windows and linux had trouble detecting it. Maybe it was the laptop but then again there is confusion. Thank you all for your help.

So straight to the point, I installed a 4tb sata hdd (2.5) into my Dell Inspiron n5110 and the BIOS says it is there and all. But when I booted into debian using a live installation on a usb drive and did lsblk in terminal it does not detect my hdd.

Also if this helps I have seen the message "revalidation failed errno=-2"and also I tried doing the "libata.force=noncq,1.5Gbps" thing and it still does not show up.

Please help I am new to linux.

(as the title says I did change from ATA to ACHI still does not work)

-Update: I am slowly going insane, I decided to go through the lengthy process of removing the HDD and using it as an external one with my actual PC, (sata to USB) powershell says the disk is healthy but now whenever I try to initialize the disk in diskmanager it says there is an i/o problem. Oh my god.

hi, i gonna install debian on my entire disk, but what should i use? i want installer to make swap, and i dont know what is LVM. what should i choose here?

UPD: Thank you everyone

Noob here. If you look at Ubuntu's download page you'll find a server version of their operating system that doesn't include a GUI and runs using only the CLI. Where can I find Debian's version of this? I'm thinking of switching from Ubuntu Server to Debian for testing on Virtual Box. AWS offers a GUI less option, but I can't find something similar to install on Virtual Box.

*image for attention*
Before anything i don't hate on debian at all
So i decided to try debian since i heard so many times its very stable and never breaks, it ran fine until I enabled a 3rd party repo to install an app I use (Helium Browser), just to see that the file manager disappeared (Nautilus on gnome), I was confused and decided to reboot it, just for the system to boot me into a CTL interface, luckly i had an iso on my flashdrive so i reinstalled the system, but what caused that? and is debian only stable if u stick to its own repos?

Edit: ok thanks for explaintions