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Debian 11 on My Main Rig: So Far Mostly OK, But Missing Some Software From Debian 10

Video download link | md5sum 76599171df667cb220bae1c371058d11 My Life With Debian 11 on Main Laptop Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: Distributions of GNU/Linux keep urging us to move to the latest, but is the latest always the greatest? On Friday my Debian 10 drive died, so I started moving to Debian 11 on a new drive and here's what that did to my life.

THIS household isn't unfamiliar with Debian 11. My wife's Raspberry Pi (400) has had it since 11 months ago and my own Pi has had it for over a year. But our main working machines were running Debian 10 for 3 years already. It worked really well. My sister recently moved from Debian 10 to 11 and complained about it; her colleagues had suffered the same and she was pressured to 'upgrade' regardless. Some people in IRC say that moving from 10 to 11 caused them problems, partly overcome by moving to 12 (testing).



"My move to Debian 11 wasn't entirely voluntary."The video above explains that some of my main problems with Debian 11 is software that's no longer supported, causing me to make rather big changes, as happened this morning. Time will tell if any other issues may be coming up. The Debian repository is still very extensive, but any change can be disruptive. The Pis with Debian 11 aren't used as traditional laptops, so that never bothered us (my wife uses 3 computers that are switched on all the time; I use 5). My move to Debian 11 wasn't entirely voluntary. My hard drive died and it make no sense to stay on Debian 10 given its limited support plan (remaining time). The same is true for my Pi; after the hardware was damaged it made sense to move to the latest stable version of Debian, i.e. 11.

Over the past year I heard and read many stories about Debian upgrades, especially from 10 to 11. On our Pis it didn't seem so disruptive and so far on my desktop/laptop I'm pleased with this latest version. In all cases -- two Pis and a laptop -- those were 'clean installs'; I'll probably report again on my experiences in weeks or months. Two days is way to little to properly assess a distro.

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