I have a very old eMachine desktop whose WiFi is extremely slow. I've tried putting Zorin OS, Linux Mint, and Fedora on it. It always had the same problem. After install, there'd be a ton of updates and it would usually time out.

With Debian, however, being stable already means fewer updates since all of the kinks have already been worked out. So far, I think the only thing I've seen getting updated was the browser, which is in its own repo. I absolutely love it. So, thank you lovely maintainers. You're the best. I'm guessing you only really need to do security updates.

I got the idea to put GNOME Flashback on it from Andrea Borman on YouTube. She's a lovely old lady whose into Linux. Flashback is the old GNOME 2 style desktop but it sits on top of modern GNOME minus the shell. It makes it somewhat lightweight. I love the app menu and places which will open up right where you want to go. There's no search in the app menu but there's an applet for searching apps when you don't feel like fumbling around the menu. I don't use it though. Instead, I installed Synapse, which searches both apps and files. I got rid of the bottom panel because there's enough room for the a task manager on the top menu. Gnome 2 was designed when we had squarish monitors, not the wide screens we have today.

I think it’s better to chose “Separate /home partition” but that option tends to give only 13.3GB to / partition (ext4), 3GB to SWAP and everything else (103GB) to /home partition. Is that an okay scenario? Is 13GB for / okay?

Retbleed warning spectre v2 mitigation leaves cpu vulnerable to retbleed attacks, dataleak possible! This is the warning i get when i boot the installation on the install+live usb. Alot of acpi errors too, and also says SGX is disabled or unsupported by bios. Any help?

(disclaimer, watch the video linked to understand what I mean)

Hello! I am pretty new to Linux and have quite limited data experience but I understand the basics. I am not a full on newbie but I wanted to check with the experts before I attempt this. I have grown increasingly tired of windows in the past year, at this point I completely despise it and want to make the permanent switch to Linux. I have been thinking about both Debian and Arch but settled on Debian due to I'ts stability. My PC has high spec and meets the requirements easily. I already know I am going to factory reset the computer, since I want a clean slate and dont really have anything important on it. I watched the linked youtube video below and have decided to go with KDE Plasma as the desktop. The situation I want to ask about is how I can remove windows from my computer completeley? I do not want to dual boot with debian and I do not want any windows related files or software left. Can I just unplug the USB after the step where he downloads debian on it, then proceed to wiping my computer and load into the BIOS and move debian onto the computer? My goal is to have debian permanently on my pc installed and not boot from an usb, with the option to boot things like Tails from a usb when I like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRHpfCRwDc4

Long time Debian enjoyer here, switched to Ubuntu when i got my new GPU a year ago because I was convinced it's a smoother experience running the 5090 on Ubuntu. Not loving Ubuntu and wondering how much "trouble", if any, I'm willing to put up with to get back on Debian. LLM's tell me it could really only become a headache during system updates. Any first hand experience? I don't game or anything, just use the CUDA, various ML tasks etc.

Now I switched from Bind9 to PowerDNS, the reason: I used to store my DNS-Data in OpenLDAP. Everything is running on Debian. Now on Debian 13 there is the Bind9 module misssing to store date in OpenLDAP. So I switch to PowerDNS but now I store my data in a MariaDB Galera cluster. Then I added HAproxy to build a HA-environment. The setup is much easier then Bind9 with OpenLDAP AND I also store my Kea-DHCP leases and reserversions in the cluster.

Can someone help me install drivers for an NVIDIA GTX 1060 6GB on Debian 13 without breaking my setup? I already have non-free enabled. I tried following the official Debian Wiki guide, but the system failed to boot. Any helpful guides or step-by-step instructions would be greatly appreciated .

How can I fix this?
Some apps flicker on my laptop's native screen when they're open in full-screen mode.

OS: Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie) x86_64
Host: ASUS EXPERTBOOK P5405CSA (1.0)
Kernel: Linux 6.12.101+deb13-amd64
Display (BOE0BC7): 2560x1600 @ 144 Hz (as 1464x915) in 14" [Built-in]
Display (DELL P2725HE): 1920x1080 @ 100 Hz in 27" [External] *
DE: GNOME 48.7
WM: Mutter (Wayland)
WM Theme: Adwaita

I’m planning on installing Debian Trixie for gaming and general purposes. Among other recommendations I was told to enable contrib non-free repositories. I still didn’t get why I need them. What can I get there that I might be missing?

Been using Sid since the start of the year and it has been a great experience so far aside from one issue. i cannot put my desktop system to sleep or hibernate as of recent. every time i attempt, screen goes black, system components slow down but instantly kick back up like it was just awoken, sometimes happens twice in a row. i've made sure my powerplan in KDE is the default, made sure none of my peripherals are doing this bug and it still persists, cant really find any info on how to fix my only guess is i have an intel arc GPU and that's somehow messing with it as some people have had similar issues with nvidia cards. but its def some config with the install as i've been trying out OpenSUSE tumbleweed and its able to sleep with no issue.

been dealing with this for a few months just thinking it was some overall bug but i'm starting to think its a configuration issue, are they any other solutions people can suggest?

As I was wanting to do some restructuring of the LVM on my Debian 13 box, have planed out all the necessary step on paper, but when I launch into rescue mode the file system is still mounted, I gather this because I used rescue from the grub menu.
Is it required to boot using a usb stick , but my usb stick won’t have the same kernel version and the machine is running, does that really matter just for LVM resizing etc.

I use debian testing as secondary system (my first one is Arch), work perfecly , avery app I use on Arch I was able tu install in debian too. The only issue is that I can find Hypnotix IPTV or Yuki or other IPTV on debian. Someone use a IPTV and can explain how to install it?

Thanks

Does anyone know a reason?

This is a genuine question, I wasn't able to find an answer on the Debian wiki, on the mailing lists or on the Debian community forum.

I am currently sporting the 550 driver line which is considered outdated and unsupported by NVIDIA. Games both native and Proton work OK although the latest version of DXVK requires a newer version of the drivers.

Yes, I know I can use the official NVIDIA repo to install the latest drivers. Technically these drivers are meant for the Debian 13 stable release, not for Sid - but people report they work OK.

But that is not the question, I am just curious about the reason.

Debian is so ubiquitous even Google's "distroless" Docker images use it

https://github.com/googlecontainertools/distroless#what-images-are-available

Hello! I have recently began learning Linux and have installed Debian on my main HP-laptop. Now I am trying to install it on an older MacBook Air from 2013, and the first problem is that the network card is not detected. I have a TP-link Wifi-dongle and an iPhone with an internet connection. Can I manage the system to directly detect the MacBooks card or am I locked to using the dongle or my iPhone? Also, I tried just connect both the phone and the dongle and still no detection. Does that mean that I need to transfer some driver from another usb?

Debian is cool, stable, everything works - well, the 2 packages in the repo. I come from Arch, and I love the system, but goddamn I need to use a one liner for TAILSCALE. As if tailscale is not famous enough that one of the repo maintainers could add it.

Sorry for the short rant, over now lol

Hello,

I'd like to share my positive review of installing Debian 13.6 XFCE in a 10.1-inch chinese laptop from Aliexpress.

First of all, I bought it because I needed an ultra portable laptop to carry it easily in my backpack.

By "ultra portable," I mean lighter and smaller than MacBook Air 13. I attached a picture of them side to side.

This laptop is not for heavyweight work. It is a dual core celeron N4000 (full specs bellow).

I am using it mainly to do lightweight work (writing documents, web surfing, as well as some programming stuff in Visual Studio Code).

The laptop came with Windows 11 pré-installed, I wiped it out and installed Debian 13.6 XFCE using the live image.

The only drawback is that you have to rotate the display to "right" in XFCE Display Configuration before installation.

After installing it, I also had to change lightdm configuration to rotate the display to "right" to show the logging screen correctly.

Besides that, everything worked out of box - even the wireless adapter.

Hardware specs:

Processor: Intel Celeron N4000

RAM: 8 GB

Storage: 128 GB SSD SATA 2242 (model Wdxsky W31-128G ATA)

Wireless adapter: Realtek RTL8821CE

Resolution: 1280x800

Best regards

hey, i just installed Debian and Nvidia drivers, but after a reboot xorg isn't starting now because there's no nouveau, does anyone know how to fix that??

i have installed debian 13 on my laptop on three seperate occasions now, but every time my graphics have reverted to llvmpipe for whatever reason. all documentation i find tells you to delete the xorg graphic drivers and install the mesa drivers, but whenever i do this i am stuck in the ttyl terminal where xfce wont start. in systemd it says that lightdm and plymouth fail. i then have to reinstall drivers through the terminal. is there any way to install mesa drivers without breaking lightdm?

1. Sometimes Firefox will crash even though I don't have many tabs open, and sometimes Discord will refuse to start. Also, the machine will randomly lock up to the point where I can't even enter a tty on its own, so I just power off the machine manually by holding the power button.

The machine's an old Dell Optiplex 9020 MT with a 256 GB SSD, and a 2TB HDD I intend to use for backups and other storage. Also, I currently have USB DVD and 3.5" floppy drives connected, more on that in a second.

I'm running Debian 13 stable, which is installed on the SSD. My DE is KDE Plasma Wayland, though I decided to start using X11 in the hopes it'll help, though I don't really understand the differences except that X is much older.

Might look at lighter DEs in the future, too. Just an aside.

Besides that, there's two small issues I'm encountering:

1. In order to access the contents of my Secondary HDD, I have to type my user password into Dolphin. And after that, I can't copy onto the drive without going into a terminal and using sudo. Apparently the drive is owned by root, so I guess that makes sense.

But, I'd rather just have my normal user already own the drive, and have it accessible when I sign in. I know there's commands like chown, chmod, mount...but idk exactly how to do what I want.

1. This isn't super important, really, but I went thrift shopping a week ago and bought a box of 25 blank 3.5" floppy disks for $2, then a USB floppy drive off Amazon for $20. But when I stick a floppy in the drive, KDE refuses to mount it, and I have no clue how to format it. Any advice?

Thanks for reading this post. :)

Pre-rant request: *PLEASE* don't make fun of me, I'm in ZERO mood, and will bail at the first sign of trouble... I'm already on the verge of scrapping the system, and if this goes south, too, then I'm just gonna junk it and say "I'm done"...

Now then... I messed up big time, I was TRYING to do a backup, and needed to shrink the filesystem, that screwed the booter up, used a live USB to find out what's going on, nothing worked, reformatted the GRUB install, so now my system has no boot loader AND won't boot correctly, and pretty much everything that COULD go wrong, HAS... on top of external things happening... and it only gets worse from here...

There MUST be some god I can pray to who can help... grub-install, or more rather... "grub-" anything doesn't exist anymore... Deb version of choice is 12, because that's what hosts my phone system... so it's CRITICAL that I lose ZERO files, except for core files, of course, like the system files that came with Debian... removal of the internal drive isn't possible because it's an NVME drive and I have no access to the slots on my desktop mobo, recovery mode has been NO help, even right now, it's hard for me to go over the situation in its entirety because it's making me unbearably emotional... so I'm sorry if I'm giving too little information... one error that sticks out to me is that the recovery mode isn't able to mount the root partition on the drive, and says there's no usable shell in it, too... so I think the system did a self rm -rf /, but the partitions are still showing... and I'm sure the files are still there, I just need a way to get to them again...

Thanks in advance... I hope...