It is 2025!! And the era of me complaining about Ubuntu is OVER!! From now on Andi complains about DEBIAN

Installer was only irritating during the partition step https://mastodon.social/@mcc/113760952350910787

Off the bat: It did not detect or correct for the 1.5x DPI of the laptop. Will someone please tell linux distributions that Lenovo has been shipping hidpi screens primarily for ten years and some of us have less-than-good eyesight. I would really love it if I could someday read my grub menu.

*Clicks "activities"*
*Types "xeyes"*
*"Searching…" appears*
*No results*
*Types "terminal"*
*Types "xeyes" in terminal*

Signs of trouble:
- Whatever the fuck that was
- gnome-terminal is black on white, which I actually prefer, except no way is it going to configure ansi colors correctly
- I'm running Wayland :( :( :( hidpi problems going from BAD to WORSE in 3, 2, 1…

DEBIAN… WHAT IS THIS :(

So there's this thing where everyone pushes Thinkpads for Linux and Lenovo LOVES, FUCKING LOVES, putting 1080p screens in a laptop so you wind up running them at 1.5x hidpi. I had a Yoga like this in like, 2015. Linux distros still treat this like an exotic configuration.

Google sends me to Debian forums which send me to the arch wiki which say to run "gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['x11-randr-fractional-scaling']". Great.

...Debian... what IS this

A point I've been trying to get to, with all three of Android, Linux and Windows, is a point where rather than "logging in" to some cloud syncy thing I have a text file somewhere containing exactly the steps that gets the system just how I like it. And then I just blow away my OS. Repeatedly. And indifferently. Because I can set a new one up in an hour. I've achieved this zen state with Android. I'm close to it with GNOME Linux, but there's a *couple* missing steps in my text file still.

I've switched to Debian and tried to recreate my Ubuntu setup. I hit a hard wall: The combination of (Debian Stable) x (GNOME) x (X11) will not give me fractional scaling, a must have. Swap (X11) for (Wayland) and I get it, but (GNOME) x (Wayland) x (Quartus IDE) is a no-go.

What about (Debian Testing/Trixie) x (GNOME) x (X11)? [EDIT: We looked into it… the patch isn't there either. https://101010.pl/@nabijaczleweli/113761518557209347 ]

The upshot of the above two posts is that, on the logic that I'm trying to live ON THE EDGE and have a laptop I can just fry every so often, and it is easier to fry it right now than it would be at any other time, that I am just gonna try KDE Plasma. I love the way GNOME looks, but I gotta admit it was giving me constant, awful problems.

So. I install KDE Plasma. The IRC assures me I don't need to re enter the installer, I can just install kde via apt. I do that and log in to KDE (Wayland). Here is the first thing I see. I have touched *nothing* on this computer yet, except to reverse scroll direction. Bad sign.

So the first thing I notice upon installing KDE is that my cursor is very ugly. I go in the settings. There's a nice pane with lots of different cursor sets to choose from. This is great! I double click on one. Nothing happens. I notice an "Apply" button. It's grayed out. I select a different cursor set. "Apply" re-enables. I click "Apply". Nothing happens. At no point in this interaction do the cursors change at all. Bad sign.

The second thing I notice is that when I click, if the click happens to be in the middle bottom of the touchpad, it pastes whatever the last text I selected in any application was. Not from the regular clipboard. The old X11 clipboard I guess. I'd forgotten how weird that thing was.

The secret to this turns out to be that in the scrollpad bar, it asks about the right-click behavior in two places. "Right click in bottom right" also enables a secret mystery middle click. But it doesn't *say* this

I gave up on KDE. It's ugly and I wasn't even able to make it all the way through my configuration process.

Now I'm in Cinnamon. It's still ugly, but a bit less. Ran through my configuration sequence without trouble. Scroll wheel acceleration rate feels weird and I can't tell if I'm imagining it; "disable touchpad while typing" seems to work worse than GNOME/KDE. This definitely looks, and feels, like A Linux Distribution and I don't mean that as a compliment, but really, I could maybe use this

Hey, Mint users. When I take a screenshot in GNOME, it copies the screenshot both to the clipboard and also to ~/Pictures/Screenshots. When I take a screenshot via the shortcut in Cinnamon, it only puts it in ~. Does anyone know how to make it send it to the clipboard also/instead?

Also, here's my biggest blocker with Cinnamon so far. There's a bar along the bottom of the screen. If I mouse over Firefox, it shows all the Firefox windows. Nice, I like this. But say I open LOTS of Firefox windows. Too many to fit on the screen. It just… goes off the right of the screen? And I can't scroll it? I cannot reach the rightmost windows at all? Is this surprising?

It appears this last thing is an issue with Debian, or possibly with Debian Bookworm. That's okay actually, I have ways of dealing with this.

So here's my current problem. I have attached an external USB drive. The name, in /media/mcc, is a 24-digit GUID. I would like it to be something shorter, such as "chuchu"*. I believe in Ubuntu I could do this by right clicking the drive in GNOME and saying "Rename". The Debian IRC asserts:

1. That Debian doesn't have this feature;
2. That it does have it, but I need to be a GNOME "privileged user". They can't explain what this means.

How do I do this?

* My laptop's name is "Anthy".

The "Rename" button is actually present in GNOME Nautilus on Debian, but it's grayed out. I tried going into gparted and naming the partition, but it didn't have any effect.

Tried to restart and it took over a minute :/ Got to the "The system will reboot now!" and then it just like…hung there…for a minute… and then suddenly moved on.

Gotta admit, the problems I'm having with Ubuntu were very Microsoft-y (platform lockin, inexplicable design decisions getting in my way) but the problems I'm having with Debian are VERY Linux 2003 (can't scroll in X, text too small and I can't change it, hang on reboot, hard drive is named 24 alphanumeric digits and I can't rename it)

Slowly sinking in that Ubuntu wasn't that bad, I was just frustrated with GNOME breaking all the time and I hated "Snaps". And Linux Mint is literally Ubuntu with GNOME removed and Snaps replaced with FlatPak (which I like). Maybe… I … should just… use… Mint.

Like, I still don't like Cinnamon as much as I liked GNOME. But I also don't hate Cinnamon as much as I hate GNOME. So m… maybe that's a win

By the way, I fixed my disk renaming problem, tho it wasted me well over an hour. The trick was to ignore "partition name" and use "partition label". To do this I had to go into "gnome-disks" and use a hidden menu, accessed by clicking an icon of a triangle inside of a square. Frustratingly, there was also a menu item in gparted for "label file system", but it was grayed out. I don't know why.

I think I might not actually be using a desktop operating system.

Okay.

I am not happy with my new OS. Cinnamon is not quite nice enough.

However, it is *acceptable*. I have my XCompose and Firefox set up how I like them. I've realized I can just mount my old hard drive, ram rustup/cargo from my old home directory into my PATH, drop into my old project directories and just… run stuff. I think I still intend to wipe and try another distro, but for now, I can just Use My Computer. So perhaps I will just enjoy the ability to do that for a day or so.

After two days of using Debian Bookworm [stable] with Cinnamon, and actually being relatively satisfied (less satisfied than I was with Ubuntu, but also less *irritated* by Random Ubuntu Bugs), I decided to upgrade to trixie [testing] as a stop before trying Pop!_OS. I followed:

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting#How_to_upgrade_to_Debian_.28next-stable.29_Testing

See:

https://mastodon.social/@mcc/113777028363772833

After rebooting, my laptop simply blinks an underscore symbol in the upper left corner. Forever. No error message.

I *can* get to a vterm. But no gdm3/X

(1/2)

I am glad I have the vterm. It means I can back up the 2 files I wanted to keep. However, I feel pretty confident now. I am not sticking with Debian. My landing point is more likely to be an Ubuntu derivative (maybe Mint) than a Debian. The problem is not exactly that Debian did not *work*. I am not expecting to find something perfect. The problem is that Debian failed to provide the specific things I was seeking Debian for (that is, rock solid reliability). (2/2)

Next: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/113777308577495918

LOL, FALSE ALARM!!!

Apparently when the wiki said "If you notice that some packages are not upgraded you should also try apt full-upgrade, but beware" what they really meant is "you dipshit, obviously run apt full-upgrade instead of upgrade or your install will just break completely". I now have a functioning Debian Stable

So I only *really* used debian before from like 2000-2001, since then it's mostly been Ubuntu. So maybe I should have known the difference between upgrade and full-upgrade. But I'm reeling a little bit. This is literally

ME: Debian, did you clean your room?

DEBIAN: Yes, mom.

ME: ...

ME: Did you clean ALL of your room?

DEBIAN: ...YES, MOM *loud sound of stomping back to room to clean it*

After upgrading from Debian Stable to Testing, whatever magical system that under both Ubuntu and Stable made it so when I plug a usb drive into my laptop it mounts at /media/mcc/drivename is no longer working. I can manually mount the drive with `mount /dev/sdNN /mnt/drivename` but that is a pain. The suggestion from the debian-next IRC is "debug it".

What is the name of the mystery system that puts mounted drives in /media/username without me having to do anything? What do I grep dmesg for?