On a modern system built around modern philosophies, its convenient. Doing stuff on systemd seems very intuitive to me and feels like a bit less work than the alternatives (atleast from my non-developer POV). If systemd hadn’t become the standard maybe my opinion would be different, but most of the time it “just works”.

On an older system, the alternatives are definitely lighter! If you’re in the group of people who believes every megabyte counts, you care about systemd. There are also oldschool tech nerds who believe systemd is insecure (they might be right idk anything).

Yeah this really pissed me off. People acting like this is a just a trivial purchase. Even $30 is alot for me sometimes and I live in the US, I can’t imagine how hard that must be to someone in Brazil.

What I think you should do (the smart choice): Compile the newest lts that supports the driver.

What I would do (the stupid choice): Frankenstein my debian install by adding a repo from somewhere else (probably sparkylinux) and pin it so nothing gets automatically pulled from that repo. Then install 6.6 from that repo. Its jank, its definitely not the recommended or supported way to do it, but I’m lazy and if I compile a kernel onto my system manually its 100% never getting updated ever.

Your wifi issues with mint were probably driver related. Ive found especially for newer devices Linux mints kernel is too old and doesn’t always fully support hardware. If you have access to Ethernet or USB hotspot you can likely download and install the newest kernel and fix that issue.

Mint is recommended for a reason, it’s a traditional Linux experience, it’s stable, and it looks familiar to newbies. Plus, lots of us Linux nerds use Debian/Ubuntu (what mint is based on) so it’s easier for us to help you.

TIL that some real boomers are on this site. 😛

I was born 99.

If I had to guess on why people get issues during updates I’d say it’s because they add a million third-party repos that point to the specific version of Debian they were running and now that they’ve upgraded they’ve got tons of outdated packages from those repos fudging up their system.

Cinnamon is actively maintained wdym by outdated?

I use Debian as my main distro. Ive played with stable, testing, and unstable over the past few years. I’m confident Trixie is perfectly fine for stable. It looked fine the last few months I used it in testing.

If old stable didn’t impress you, Trixie isn’t gonna be any different. The hype is just because a release happened, we don’t get those in Debian land very often.

If you move to Linux, you gotta be committed. I didn’t learn Linux until I said “fuck it” and forced myself to use it exclusively.

You will run into problems. You’ll have some days where you’ll spend 10hrs fixing something that no other person on the entire planet has encountered before, only to realize you needed to type in 1 very simple command to fix it.

As much as people hate AI, it can help with Linux troubleshooting. There’s also wikis and manpages.

If you switch at all, pick something that won’t break. Debian will run on your hardware just fine. You won’t have the latest and greatest packages, and as a newbie you DO NOT WANT the latest and greatest.

Nvidia drivers are a hassle, be prepared.

If all that sounds doable, send it.

I know most people aren’t watching 4k. I loaded 4k because it used more memory. I agree it’s not a realistic workload for someone with a 4gb laptop.

Sorry if I was grouchy.

1. Vencord is running in the background.
2. Most people aren’t watching YouTube in 4k on their computer
3. I have a good bit of stuff cached in memory (as shown by the different colors in htop)

My system uses under 4gb watching a 4k video on youtube. I can’t imagine many people are doing anything much more intensive than that.

I’m a big big fan of Debian. The installer can be a little intimidating for newbies but I think it’s a great all-around “throw it at the wall” kinda Linux distro. Ubuntu is based on it so you’ll find similarities between them.

All the power to ya! Doesn’t matter if it’s Stable, Testing, or Unstable, if it works for you that’s all that matters.

There is a way to “pin” package versions isn’t there?

I wonder if that would prevent this kind of thing from uninstalling a package that is in transition. Ofc, it wouldn’t get any updates, but I’d take that over just not having the package.

Flatpak works though!

Debians testing branch might be a good shout. Packages stay pretty up-to-date and usually stuff doesn’t break. Worst case you can pull a package from unstable when needed.

I think linux distros are a coinflip on if they like your hardware or not, sometimes it feels like they just don’t like you individually as a person.

When I use fedora for example, everything that can go wrong does go wrong. It’s in theory not any more complicated than debian, but I’ve never had good luck keeping a fedora system healthy.

With Debian, usually the best troubleshooting tip I can give people is try installing testing instead of stable. Sometimes the kernel in stable is just too damn old for the hardware you want to install on.

Debian just works.

Even a system that uses 90mb of ram on a cold boot will accumulate gigs of stuff in cache if you’re using it. (assuming it has the memory for it) That isn’t what people have a problem with though.

Maybe this is an incorrect use of language on my part, but I feel like I’m not the only person who means “memory actively being used by a process” when referring to memory usage. I understand the whole linux ate my ram thing. That just isn’t what I or what I assume a lot of people mean when talking about this.

When I boot up my system, pull up my terminal, run htop, and see 800-1200mb being used just by processes (not in buffer, not in cache), that doesn’t raise any flags or anything, but I also know that some people have gotten their systems so streamlined they use 10x less than that. That’s all memory that could be used by other things. That could be the difference between a low memory system running a web browser or not. Could be the difference maker in a game someone wants to play on their system. There are endless possibilities.

I use it because I’m frankly too dumb to use something else, but if that wasnt the case, i dont think id be speaking fondly of it.

I’m a ram usage fetishist, I absolutely disagree with the “unused ram is wasted ram” phrase that has caught on with people.

I see some of these distros running a graphical environment with only 90mb ram usage and i cream myself. All of them run something other than systemd, usually avoid GNU stuff, and…require you basically to be a developer to use them.

I already run a half broken, hacked together system due to my stubborness, I can’t imagine how fucked I’d be if I tried one of these cool kid minimalist distros.