And all the apps I need open themselves after I log in. 😁👍

I know it’s silly and no one should care, but I can’t help it, I always end up back on Debian. Spent the last few weeks jumping between distros, trying to convince myself something else would stick, but nope. There’s just something about Debian that feels like home.

I won't waste your time and ramble on but installing Debian was probably one of the best decisions I've ever made.

I bought my laptop online for peanuts because I needed something cheap and the specs on are, well, not great. It came pre-installed with Windows 10 when I got it. It was somewhat manageable but the CPU was screaming even when no other programs were running. So I decided to try Linux. At first I wanted to try Ubuntu but I couldn't even get the installer to boot before it froze, threw a bunch of errors on screen and then dipped out. So I did a little more research and I tried Debian Trixie. To say that I was shocked at how well everything was running is an understatement. I had successfully turned a piece of e-waste (even at the time the laptop was released) into a usable machine.

So if you've got an old decrepit computer lying around, try Debian. I've been a Windows user my whole life but until "Microslop" decides to get rid of all the useless features they keep making (cough cough Copilot) I dont think I'll change back.

(I included a picture of my specs in case you're curious. Sorry if it looks bad, the screen is super reflective)

As some may or may not be aware from friends who happen to make use of proprietary platforms such as Discord, age verification and "protecting the children" is all the rage these days. Just one small problem: where is your ID being sent to?

Back earlier this year, Discord announced a policy of adopting global age verification methods. If you are under the age of 16 or Discord does not have adequate information needed to verify your age, you will be locked out of certain features & be age-gated from joining specific servers. These policies resulted in enough outrage that alternatives to Discord like Stoat & Fluxer have made the waves, and Discord itself decided to kick the can towards the second-half. We are now in the second half, and Discord has suddenly brought age verification back up as a "Discord Preview", meaning these policy changes are about to start. As someone who is highly involved in the primary Debian space & wider Linux space on Discord, these recent events are worrying and have been since February. What are we to do now?

Some of you might be aware that there is an active relationship between said widely-used community Discord and this subreddit. We are not abandoning or deleting that anytime soon, but we will be pushing users on Reddit to start using Fluxer as our primary community chat space going forward for several reasons while Discord is maintained as an easily accessible "necessary evil" for the purposes of education regarding Debian:

• Fluxer is free and open source, almost completely compatible with Discord API, and can do many of the things Discord can do. APKs exist for Android over on their GitHub, and there is a public beta test for iOS users right now.
• The Debian Community Fluxer is 100% bridged with the Discord, meaning you are not walking into an empty space and can communicate with people on the Discord instance. Both are actually run by the same people including myself, u/wizard10000, and a few others.
• Many will ask why we don't just link to Debian IRC or Matrix instances instead and the answer is simple; we should be embracing any and all efforts to help promote & foster high quality, educational spaces for Debian as a means to an end. Many younger individuals in particular are learning about Linux on arenas such as Discord versus traditional platforms.

The long-term goal is to create an independent, community-run space under a FOSS platform that can exist without depending on the Discord instance, but still be accessible to the masses using nothing but a browser or a phone to participate in. Today, we are beginning work towards that mission, and we hope to see you participating over on https://fluxer.gg/debian soon!

I've been using Debian stable since the 2000's and I only tested sid a few times. The last one probably more than 10 years ago (I don't even remember).

So, a question for all of those running sid: how stable has been sid for you the last year or two? Asking for desktop general usage. Any broken packages? Security issues? Did you have to touch the system config often? Are you happy? Be honest.

I've been trying Linux distros from back to 2018 and absolutely all of them had some annoying problem I was unable to solve so I just decided to drop it.

It's been like this all these years, going back and forth to Windows or having dual boot but mainly using Windows.

Last year I really got into GNOME as the desktop environment by testing Fedora and decided to stick with it. But some problems with codecs in Fedora were getting on my nerves, so I decided to go Debian and oh my...

It's by far the most stable and compatible with everything linux distro I've ever tried. I'm having success with every single thing I'm trying to customize and install and... well... as Todd Howard would say: it just works! It even managed to make the huion tablet work, which I never had success with.

I absolutely love Debian and will protect it at all costs. My linux usage has increased exponentially and I barely use Windows 11 anymore.

Hope you guys enjoy!

Hello, I'm Playing with winehq-devel, debian Sid, xfce.

How I installed a fully functional default wine prefix, based on the one teached here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbbXoqDfkY0&t=1s

-> this can be executed all at once:

WINEPREFIX="path/to/prefix" winetricks dotnet20 dotnet48 d3dcompiler_43 d3dcompiler_47 d3dx9 d3dx10 d3dx11_42 d3dx11_43 faudio vcrun2005 vcrun2008 vcrun2010 vcrun2012 vcrun2013 vcrun2015 quartz

-> these better executed one by one, retry if needed. -> first time all is downloaded and cached . -> /home/user/.cache/winetricks/

WINEPREFIX="path/to/prefix" winetricks dxvk

WINEPREFIX="path/to/prefix" winetricks faudio

WINEPREFIX="path/to/prefix" winetricks sdl

WINEPREFIX="path/to/prefix" winetricks ogg

WINEPREFIX="path/to/prefix" winetricks openal

WINEPREFIX="path/to/prefix" winetricks 7zip

WINEPREFIX="path/to/prefix" winetricks corefonts

WINEPREFIX="path/to/prefix" winetricks vcrun2019

WINEPREFIX="path/to/prefix" winetricks winamp

I'been playing Warcraft III and Frozen Throne, Battle for Middle Earth series, plants vs zombies, Stalker Anomaly (like in the video). -> all fine.

Most "portable" apps (contained within their own directory, needing basic windows DLLS, hence, "portables") of the era work fine as long as the required runtimes are installed, that can be done with a little research.

I found that running from Thunar's right click -> wine windows program loader -> works better than doing it from CLI for some cases.. strange, but yes.

I Undestand that these winehq deb pkgs are not compiled with ntsync support, even the latest ones. I guess sometime in the future they'll be? I might compile wine +ntsync support myself, also. but for now I have the kernel driver compiled in, waiting for that update in the near future. Maybe I get tired of waiting and decide to compile wine.

I am tired of freakingly large updates on rolling release distributions and also something breaking over and over again. If something is not breaking then there is probably something that is not working properly.

I have switched from Ubuntu to Debian for my work laptop. But I also game. Mostly from Steam and Heroic. Don't need snap or flatpak for my gaming pc as I don't work on it. This pc is just for leisure time.

I have been reading about Debian backports. I am going to try that. I will be installing kernel, firmware and mesa. Any other suggestions? Anyone else using Debian backports for gaming? How is your experience with Heroic and Steam for gaming on Debian with or without backports?

It's been quite some time since I switched to Linux, and I've already tried a lot of distros, being my favorite ones Mint and Fedora KDE. Either way, I have seen A LOT of people talking about how great, good, stable and amazing Debian is. And I haven't used that one yet, but I want to give it a try. I have asked AI like Gemini about what could be better for my PC, which I use mainly to play games in Steam (like Dota 2), watch videos, study and occasionally do some video/image editing, and it says that Debian wouldn't be a good option in general for my PC. So, of course I am not a development user that will have some server or other complex stuff. I would like to ask the people who knows about that in this community, what should I do if all I wanna do is keep going with my simple stuff, without complicating too much my life? Using Debian would be the same or better (or worse) than Mint when it comes to playing Dota 2, for example? Thank you for the answers, in advance. And any other recommendation that you can give for using Linux is very welcome.

I have been using Linux entirely for about a year and a half now, and it feels incredible to use. I started with beginner-friendly distributions like Zorin and Mint, and eventually discovered Debian back in late December. I immediately loved it because it felt like the perfect middle ground: stable, secure, and configurable without being unnecessarily difficult.

Lately, though, something feels different. I have been trying to get the absolute most out of LXDE, but I feel like I am running up against its limits. I am considering Arch because I want to build a system from the ground up, but I am hesitant. I am not sure if a rolling release model or switching terminal commands will be a steep adjustment, or if Arch might simply be too much maintenance for me.

For those who made a similar jump (or decided to stay on Debian), how was your experience?

(btw, this is what i got lxde to look like after some ricing)

I was at Costco last night with my mum and little sister and when we went out Something caught my eye and I went over to look and I was pleasantly surprised and somewhat amused :)

“Hey it just uses Linux” i said as I pulled out my phone to take these photos

Currently installing Debian 12 on an old hp compaq nx6110 laptop, and it is pain. This loading bar's been going for at least 40 minutes, and the prior steps also take at least 20 minutes combined. No help needed, just a vent post. Also for anyone thinking of doing Debian on this model of laptop for the love of god don't use the netinst iso, use the dvd iso. The network card has a tendency to die, and then you got a base install with no network and no way to GET a network. Will update with results when done.

Sorry for the mobile formatting by the way

I’d like to say one thing dear r/debian people.

I really love Debian

Thank you for your time :)))

youve heard about the UEFI secure boot certificates expiring in june 2026 (next month).

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windows-itpro-blog/act-now-secure-boot-certificates-expire-in-june-2026/4426856

heres how i checked the dates of mine

sudo apt install efitools

efi-readvar -v db -o db.esl

sig-list-to-certs db.esl db_cert

for cert in db_cert*.der; do echo "=== $cert ==="; openssl x509 -inform der -in "$cert" -noout -text | grep -iE 'subject=|not before|not after'; done

mine returned 2038 so i think im good?

EDIT:

fwupdmgr security

might shine here! mine shows db: VALID

fwupdmgr get-devices

shows some dbx info.

I found an easy and great explanation on how to install the latest NVIDIA drivers on Debian 13. I thought I would share it because maybe someone will find it useful.

https://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2025/debian-nvidia-guide/#21-download-nvidia-installer-package

Una amiga que iba a viajar en metro hoy, se encontró con el lector de tarjetas en modo escritorio Debian, un distro de Linux, y no sabemos cómo hizo la persona para volver al escritorio, si no hay teclado, puertos de cable, ni botones en la pantalla para salirse. Por ahora ella es la primera que lo ha visto, aunque no sabemos si en otras estaciones del metro esto también ocurre

I'm a web developer, planning to switch to Linux & after some research i decided to go with Debian, I love everything about this OS and its philosophy of community work & volunteering to keep it alive, but I don't wanna see it die & looking at their website I'm getting slightly worried.

What are the jobs that the Debian team really needs to be filled right now?

* Sorry for my English.

To start with - this post is a thank you letter to the Debian team.

I opened TimeShift the other day and saw that it was back in march I installed Debian stable onto my machine. This time with btrfs - because I found the technology very nice - but it has never come in use.

I think the reason is that I spent a few weeks before this install to dial in the nvidia drivers to with apt and their train, other utils and apps.
Into my own install script, plus a btrfs script to set it up to work like TimeShift wants it.

After that - has my sailing the Debian stable just been boring and nice.
Nothing has been broken with an update and Gnome 48 is working well.
Even gaming is working well with nothing to write about there.

I would love somethings would have an easier barrier to entry, when I dialed everything in. But it has been well worth the adventure when I look back over the past months - I had no problems on my main system.

My rig is used mainly for gaming but I do also develop on it and work from it.

So Debian team, with my long time on other distros & winslop - thank you for giving be a stable machine that keeps me doing what I want day to day.

I've run Debian for years. Running Trixie now before it was stable, I built a custom workspace setup booting directly from a bare Debian TTY into a massive environment.

My entire setup relies on Debian as the base substrate. It provides absolute stability. I've started to open source the custom programs I built for this environment, some in Rust, C++, this one is an SDDM QML based theme, (more coming, hopefully I'll have enough time).

This theme is the eye candy of that stack. And I would love to share it with you guys!

So part of it required the rite of passage of a login theme. But the problem is, I downloaded existing themes to test.

They all have these overly flashy styles that don't fit my setup, too bloated, with zero configurability, and even if one is configurable, the installation is very sloppy, leaving bloat, and obscuring the system state, you can't remove it cleanly, and you'd have to be an SDDM expert in 5 minutes on a Monday morning.

So I built this theme system to sync perfectly with my desktop.

But also to be fully configurable, and hardened like a piece of serious enterprise software, since I really cannot afford to break my machine on those days (that's the entire reason I'm running Debian in the first place).

CI/CD running cross-distribution smoke tests verifying it works, lint, formatting, checks. Composable QML design system, idempotent installer/uninstaller, safe actions, and so on.

The installation mechanism is atomic and idempotent, think Terraform like. It details the exact system changes before execution. The uninstallation is also first-class. It cleans all artifacts and fonts. It reverts to the previous theme. But, it deliberately retains Qt dependencies since there's no way to know.

Even included a full guide/doc on how SDDM works, where everything sits, how the theme installs/uninstalls and what to do just in case you spawned in a TTY because something broke.

A safe preview command exists if you want to tweak things and test without restarting or bricking your actual login.

And speaking of tweaks, here's what you can configure (everything through a simple theme.conf file):

• Background: image or video path, blur intensity, and video looping support (mp4, webm, mkv, mov and more)
• Visuals: font family (any system font) and font size
• Layout: form position (left/center/right), date format, time format (12h, 24h, or long)
• Animation: transition duration and easing curve for buttons and icons (OutQuart, OutCubic, OutBack, etc.)
• Colors - text: date, time, username field, password field, placeholder, login button, environment selector, and power/restart/sleep icons
• Colors - backgrounds: login form, username input, password input, and login button
• Colors - dropdown: text, selected text, background, selected background, border, and selected border
• Colors - hover states: login button, system buttons, and environment button
• Fingerprint login: auto-trigger PAM fingerprint auth on load, falls back to password if it fails or isn't configured

MIT licensed, free and open source software.

Source ---> https://github.com/rccyx/thyx