Kernels shouldn’t be a problem if you have the backports repo enabled (you can enable it during install, otherwise add it to your sources.list).

You do first have to specify that you want the kernel from backports (or set up APT pinning preferences), but after that, it’ll keep that specific package updated whenever you run sudo apt upgrade and there’s a newer version.

If you installed the generic Linux image on installation (usually the default, I believe), the quick way to upgrade is basically just:

sudo apt install -t bookworm-backports linux-image-amd64

It should be noted that backports is not Sid or Testing, it’s stuff built specifically for current Stable that people might need newer versions of for various reasons (e.g. hardware, limited feature updates that don’t affect the base system, some development libraries, etc.), so it’s quite small in the amount of unique packages it has. Like, you can get newer LibreOffice packages, but you’re not going to get Plasma 6 or whatever.

Right now, the kernel is on 6.7 in backports, while Stable is on 6.1 and Sid is on 6.8. So you’ll get them a tiny bit later, but that’s in terms of days/weeks, rather than, you know, the usual two-ish years (not counting security updates).

Side note: if you want all this enabled by default, Spiral Linux is just straight up Debian Stable with a bunch of firmware packages preinstalled for easier installation on a variety of hardware and the kernel is updated via backports by default, so you could give that a shot as well.

It’s not like “a distro based on Debian”, it is Debian, but set up with conveniences for modern desktop users and also sets up btrfs + apt snapshotting by default, similar to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed’s process.

Nice, that looks incredibly helpful. Thanks for the rec!

Works fine on Android as well (which is weird considering how bad Apple software can be on non-Apple devices). Just need to create an Apple ID and you’re set.

Testing out the trial right now and it’s pretty great so far.

UI is way better than Spotify as well (IMO), plus lossless for the same price as current Spotify Premium. (And it also has a max cache size limit option, so even playing a shit ton of lossless isn’t going to eat up more space than what you select.)

Getting my fucking Spotify library and playlists I’ve built over the years on here is going to be a long nightmare, though.

Nah, I think it’d be called something like… Mozilla Attention Token.

Ah, I responded to one of your comments in your other thread, but it’s more relevant here.

Debian has several live ISOs with the Calamares installer that most other distros use, so it’s as easy to install as any of those.

No need to use the more complicated setup. Boot up the live CD/USB and install like anything else.

If anything, the default install is filled with too many applications (at least the KDE one). Got all the office software, media players, a browser, and anything else that might be relevant. Even comes with a bunch of accessibility stuff like a screen reader preinstalled (but not configured).

Also, you can install Timeshift immediately and use it. Don’t know why that’s an issue. Yeah, it’s not preinstalled, but it’s super simple to install and run the first snapshot and have it do its thing in the background. (Actually, this goes for Fedora as well as several other distros which you’ve put in your recommendations, so it’s not unique to Debian or Ubuntu.)

Honestly, even as someone who uses Timeshift and Debian, I’ve needed to use it waaaaaaay less than I ever did on Kubuntu. I don’t know how someone who isn’t tinkering is going to break the system enough to need Timeshift, really.

I’m not even sure if someone unfamiliar with Linux and not interested in the inner workings will even really understand the purpose or how to use Timeshift either. There are Windows users who have no idea about System Restore or how to use it, which is the closest equivalent.

Also, it’s around two years between releases. Same as Ubuntu LTS, which Mint is based on (and Mint also has a Debian edition based on Debian Stable which they may move to at some point, if the burden of “fixing” Ubuntu becomes too much).

Its biggest problem for beginners is the upgrade process. Instead of just notifying you about a new release and offering to upgrade your whole system, it’s usually on you to follow the release cycle and change the relevant lines in your sources.list, which isn’t particularly user friendly.

So, I don’t know if you’re aware, but Debian has live CDs/USBs with the same Calamares installer that so many other distros use. Pick any of the eight different DE ISOs and the installation process is identical to that of… pretty much everything.

It’s all preconfigured (to the point where some might say there’s a bit of bloat) and there’s no need to go messing around with the more complicated stuff (although I’m not certain if it requires enabling the non-free repo separately or offers it on installation; that would be the only major issue).

My only problem with that installation method is that the default partition setup sticks with the traditional “half your RAM size” swap space, which I think is annoying. But if someone doesn’t know or care about what swap is, there’s no real problem with it.

Lol, so they’re going to be training their AI on… AI generated content? The uptick in that shit on reddit has made it more annoying than usual.

That and all the confidently incorrect shit on the site… Not to mention the constant in-jokes. I’m just imagining a chatbot responding to something about how to deal with grief with “I also choose this man’s dead wife!”

Can’t see how this could possibly go wrong.

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Just going to quickly shill for The Amelia Project as well. Really fantastic little show.

After my bios splash, it shows „welcome to grub“ and then switches to the debian start menu for 3 seconds or so, then shows some terminal stuff and then starts kde splash and then login.

Yeah, the reason for this is that sometimes Debian doesn’t enable Plymouth splash screens by default, so you just see the text stuff. It actually annoys me a bit.

Not on my computer at the moment, so I can’t remember the exact packages you might need, but if I recall, they should be plymouth-themes and kde-config-plymouth (so that you can choose the splash screen theme in your system settings). You can also find other themes online, but I forgot the name of that website where all the stuff is. Pling? I think it’s that.

Anyway, once you have the themes installed, you need to sudo edit /etc/default/grub and append "quiet splash" (with the quotes) to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT= (“quiet” might already be there).

You can also change the value of GRUB_TIMEOUT= in that file to whatever your preference might be for the duration of grub’s boot menu, but there might be other things you need to adjust in order to hide it completely and still be able to access it if necessary.

After that, run sudo update-grub so that it’s using the new config and choose whichever theme you want in the system settings.

Alternatively, grub-customizer is a GUI app that you can install to do all of the above (which will also update grub when you save your changes). Just don’t touch anything that’s not relevant. Stick to just the duration of the grub boot menu and add the splash parameter. Ignore boot priority, etc.

It should feel less “slow” to start up once all that’s sorted.

Yeah, Kubuntu’s fine. It has some of the Snap stuff, but the “minimal install” greatly strips down unnecessary bullshit to the point where I even find vanilla Debian Plasma to be more bloated in comparison.

I used Kubuntu for most of my time on Linux before switching to Debian. Still fully recommend it as a basically “plug and play” distro with a quick installer that works OOTB.

There’s also a KDE-specific backports PPA which gets you new Plasma and Qt stuff fairly quickly, but that works best on regular releases rather than LTS releases. (The only issue is that, because it uses Launchpad, the Plasma updates can be super fucking slow to download, regardless of your network speed).

Then again, if someone’s going to be using LTS versions only, there’s not really that much of a difference between it and Debian Stable in terms of DE updates.

It’s a bit hidden in the FAQ, but here you go.

Probably inevitable considering Jeremy Soller is the lead dev on Redox while also currently contributing to COSMIC.

To be honest, I’m surprised COSMIC isn’t the default, but it’s likely due to display server stuff that isn’t part of Redox (Wayland, etc.).

You can get a Cinnamon image via U-Blue.

U-Blue in general is a nice collection of images because not only are there various unofficial options, but a lot of things like RPMFusion, etc. are preconfigured in their versions of the main editions (SilverBlue, Kinoite, Sericea, Onyx).

Or you can just rebase regular SilverBlue (or one of the three other official variants) to one of those images if you’re running it already. Can roll back if you don’t like it.

I doubt there’ll be an official edition until Cinnamon has full Wayland support since Fedora is going all in on that now.

In the meantime, the community has it covered.

Lol, reading that “censorship” section alone tells you all you need to know about the author there.

Literally hammering 1984 quotes like they love to do (dude, if Mozilla has the same kind of power as the Party, I must be chilling under a rock somewhere). Even has one of their sections called “Cucking to Manifest V3”.

Back to the “censorship”:

They want to algorithmically decide which content is allowed to be posted, and which isn’t. This is especially relevant in the context of the fake pandemic, during which the whole world has been enslaved exactly thanks to the propagation of the “factual voices” over the so-called “disinformation”. The “disinformation” here includes mentioning the factual harm done by COVID vaccines or even proven alternative treatments for COVID itself. So, Mozilla supports a world where people are harmed without being able to defend themselves.

Yeah, sorry. No. People with this little regard for reality shouldn’t be taken seriously when presenting arguments.

This whole screed is aimed at a very particular brand of user that looooooves to pretend they’re all “facts”, when it’s just emotional outrage over perceived slights. Same ones who complained about DDG when they tried to deal with Russian propaganda links showing up too often.

It’s all very conspiratorial, as is expected, yet offers no real answers because conspiracies very rarely have any.

Also, have to lol at the SystemD shit showing up at the end there as well.

Can I just say that my favorite thing about Xfce users is that whenever the dumb “GNOME vs KDE” shit starts, you guys are all chill in the back being like, “let them fight while I drink my tea and move on with my life”.

I might be a very longtime Plasma user, but I appreciate the shit out of Xfce and what its capable of while being light as a feather. Other than Budgie, it’s the only DE I could actually see myself using if I absolutely had to ditch KDE for whatever reason. Although my reliance on Dolphin alone makes that very, very difficult. Thunar is pretty good, though. More file managers should have batch renaming built-in. Then I wouldn’t have to use GPRename or KRename for so much shit.

Huh. Didn’t know about that one. Thanks for mentioning it!

it is the best option on Android currently since Bromite is almost always a Chromium version behind whatever is current.

Right now Bromite is unmaintained and has been for a long time. I shudder to think how many versions it’s behind.

If you want a FOSS Chromium-based Android browser, use Mulch. It gets updates fairly quickly and serves much of the same purpose that Bromite did, while actually having a (very slightly) larger dev team.

Edit: Oops. Didn’t realize that Mulch doesn’t have a content blocker. Someone else mentioned Cromite (which does have a built-in content blocker), so that might be a good option as well.

Vivaldi, though it’s source available rather than fully open source. It’s mostly the frontend JavaScript (I think?) code which is proprietary.

Apparently, if you know enough to understand it, you can technically work out what all the proprietary code is and does because it’s all fairly simple stuff and separate from the Chromium base (which they make available on their site), although distributing it would be against their ToS (I guess it’s technically reverse engineering, which is also against their ToS).

It’s been a very long time and I can’t actually confirm that for the current release, but it was at least true a few years ago when someone who knew far more about programming than me mentioned it on their forums. I think some people took a look at it and found some basic theming stuff, but nothing nefarious.

They have a fairly solid privacy policy last I checked. They also have no intention of sticking with Google’s v3 plans.

The only thing I don’t like is they run a daily user count check by pinging their servers. They’ve made it so that there are no IDs, anonymized or otherwise, but it’s still a bit of a black mark on an otherwise decent piece of software.

YaST in a nutshell…

Takes a whole bunch of system command line stuff (and even stuff already in other GUIs) and throws it into a Windows-like control panel type thing.

Now, it’s great that it’s an option.

What’s not great is opening it and seeing dozens of fucking options, not knowing what half of them are if you’re new to Linux. (To be honest, it’s even overwhelming if you are familiar with Linux.)

So the people it’s supposed to appeal to end up with a complicated control panel they don’t understand, and the people who actually know what all the entries are for end up sticking with the terminal and ignoring it altogether.

Although, all things being fair, no one new to Windows would really understand the control panel either, but at least it’s so widely used that any instructions you get about it usually won’t have you going into the registry or cmd.exe or PowerShell or something.

On Linux and using YaST? Here’s the response you’ll usually get: “Okay, so click the exit button and look for something called ‘Konsole’ or ‘Terminal’ in your applications. Open that up and paste this command…”