this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Title pretty much says it all. I've been using ubuntu as my daily driver for the last 5 years or so and honestly, I've had a wonderful experience with it.

That said, with the way things are going, I feel like its only a matter of time before Canonical pulls the rug out so I'd like to at least get my feet wet with something other than Ubuntu and Debian seems like the logical choice.

I mainly use my machines for gaming, self hosting, programming, and weird networking projects/automation testing.

I've heard gaming on debian isnt as 'out of the box' as it is with Ubuntu. So I'm hoping somone with more experience can share some tips on what I should be looking out for or point me to some good guides. Thanks yall.

EDIT: I fucking love this community. Thank you all for your replies. I appreciate you taking the time to help me out.

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[–] gnuhaut@lemmy.ml 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Use the net installer. Leave the root password empty if you want sudo installed. There is probably no need for you to read the official installation manual, but maybe do so if you run into any trouble.

There are wiki pages for the most common things you might want to setup, like how to install steam, nvidia driver, enable backports (good way to get (some) newer packages without breakage), and enable flatpak. Just google "debian wiki nvidia" etc.

[–] hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Holy shit I never knew you could have sudo installed like that. Always done it post-install lmao

[–] gnuhaut@lemmy.ml 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah it actually says that in the text on that root password screen. But nobody ever reads that, me included. Literally everybody I have told this to was surprised when they hear about it. It's a total UI failure.

[–] Espi@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

It says it? TIL

I knew about that (kinda intuitively, openSUSE installer behaves the same way and I just assumed that Debian would be the same)

[–] lemann@lemmy.one 8 points 1 year ago

Same lol, I was confused at why some of my selfhosting boxes had sudo and some didn't, despite being installed fresh from the same ISO

[–] finickydesert@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why not use doas instead of sudo?

[–] espi@mas.to 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@finickydesert @gnuhaut The installer installs sudo.

Also, what are the advantages of doas compared to sudo?

[–] legoraft@reddthat.com 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

afaik, doas is a bit more minimal than sudo, so less bloatware. Sudo has a lot of CVE's every year and because doas is way smaller, it has a lot less security issues.

[–] Cornelius@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Protip: for anyone in the fence, you can install doas then simply alias sudo for doas. Nothing changes in how you use your shell but it's now more secure