It’s very worth the try.

I worked with seriously hardware constricted machines for years and users on a learning curve.

KDE did not make my fancy when I tried it, when first moving from Windows, 20 years ago. Not then, not now. I know it has evolved a great deal but I can’t justify commiting so much hardware resources for the DE alone. And the obcession with the K’s are a bit of a pet peeve. I’m aware I’m getting some packages from it now and then and I have to eventually try it again but tomorrow is not the eve of such day.

I used Gnome until Gnome ceased to be Gnome and reinvented itself under that smartphone aspect. Mate forked and maintained that simple approachable look and feel.

XFCE is good but I missed the dual panel on the file explorer and eventually moved from it. It also tended to force me to mannually configure sound settings, keyboard hotkeys and other small things that otherwise were readily available.

I spent some time with Bunsen Labs installed on a machine and I enjoyed the look and feel. Conky was the jewel for me. But I had other users on that machine that didn’t adapt.

A short stint on Enlightenment. Not my cup of tea. Deepin was a disappointment. And I couldn’t motivate myself to manually configure a tile manager. I want a computer, not another hobby.

I used LXQT for some time but I felt it lacking. Very light and very fast but… Cinnamon is a nope for me, personally, but I have set it up for others and people enjoyed it, even more when coming from Windows.

But isn’t this the beauty of Linux? There is an option for everyone. Like you very well put it: you do you.

Doesn’t Mint just configures Cinnamon as default DE and leaves the rest alone, working from the stable branch? That’s my understanding.

I also run Debian. One desktop and three laptops. I run Mate, normally. The best compromise between useability and DE resource use. But I’ve used XFCE and LXDE.

My understanding is that Mint focus development of LMDE around Cinnamon but the other DEs are there nonetheless, untouched, like Debian releases it.

Really?

I always vote for boredom, which means I vote for Debian. It’s a well rounded, reliable and solid OS. It can be a bit dated on some packages but it rewards with very low maintenance. It works. It does what it is supposed to do, which is allowing us to run and use our computer as we see fit.

You want something a bit more up to date? Move to Mint. If Debian still appeals to you, move to LMDE.

If you can, look for used Lenovo Thinkpads. Those machines are extremely compatible with Linux, out of the box, have good hardware profiles and, if used, can be sources really cheap and are very easily repairable.

I have two Thinkpads running Debian and the machines are brilliant.

That is what I intend to get as well. But it would be welcome seing Murena widen their to the entire Gigaset line, like Volla as done.

I’ll be serving as the tester for a de-googled phone, hopefully, next month for my family. If all works within expectations, we’ll be moving towards no google phone until the end of the year.

I’ll be getting a Murena phone.

No worries. Somewhere, somehow, the solution awaits.

Sorry to inform you that besides filling my hard drive with unnecessary clutter, my printer remains as was.

Now… How do I purge my system from all this?

bash simply returns a command not found message when invoking gutenprint-printer-app

I haven’t installed the GUI

The printer remains as is, faulty

I’ve installed the gutenprint driver but my specific printer is not listed as a supported model. Testing it as I write this but with no particular hopes…

edit: and no, it still prints one sheet at a time, no duplex, and it botching the image printing quality

install.sh: 27: Syntax error: "(" unexpected

Just like that.

Debian stable

I get the reference and I second that one.

I’m here wondering if it will be a good time to switch over to Devuan

@mvirts@lemmy.world @kumi@feddit.online @wickedrando@lemmy.ml @IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz @angband@lemmy.world @doodoo_wizard@lemmy.ml

Update - 2026.01.12

After trying to follow all advices I was given and failling miserably, I caved in and reinstalled the entire system, this time using a Debian Stable Live Image.

The drives were there - sda and sbd - the SSD and the HDD, respectively. sda was partioned from 1 through 5, while sbd had one single partition. As I had set during the installation. No error here.

However, when trying to look into /etc/fstab, the file listed exactly nothing. Somehow, the file was never written. I could list the devices through ls /dev/sd* but when trying to mount any one of it, it returned the location was not listed under /etc/fstab. And I even tried to update the file, mannually, yet the non existence of the drives persisted.

Yes, as I write this from the freshly installed Debian, I am morbidly curious to go read the file now. See how much has changed.

Because at this point I understood I wouldn’t be going anywhere with my attemps, I opted to do a full reinstall. And it was as I was, again, manually partitoning the disk to what I wanted that I found the previous instalation had created a strange thing.

While all partions had a simple sd* indicator, the partition that should have been / was instead named “Debian Forky” and was not configured as it shoud. It had no root flag. It was just a named partition in the disk.

I may be reading too much into this but most probably this simple quirk botched the entire installation. The system could not run what simply wasn’t there and it could not find an sda2 if that sda2 was named as something completely different.

Lessons to be taken

I understood I wasn’t clear enough of how experienced with Debian I was. I ran Debian for several years and, although not a power-user, I gained a lot of knowledge about managing my own system tinkering in Debian, something I lost when I moved towards more up-to-date distros, more user-friendly, but less powerful learning tools. And after this, I recognized I need that “demand” from the system to learn. So, I am glad I am back to Debian.

Thank you for all the help and I can only hope I can returned it some day.

Because I like having my disk properly partitioned, to keep things properly separated. Unlike windows.

And no, I haven’t queried any AI. Because why question a machine when I can ask real human beings and learn from them instead?

I’m going to sit down today and get into it seriously. I’ve just been replying to comments that I can clarify with no need for me to be messing with the computer.