Debian 9 is truly a great distro

[RU55EL]

I am very pleasantly surprised at the flawless performance of Stretch on my NUC. Very solid, and performs a little better at HD video playback than Jessie.

[tynman]

Debian is surely not the only one that changes the UUID of swap.

I know I saw this swap-UUID-switch behavior in Jessie every time I did a new installation. Pretty sure in Wheezy too.

I had always assumed this "feature" (assign a new UUID to a new swap partition) was a function of the swapon command, and I further assumed the Debian installer calls the swapon command after formatting the swap partition. I'm not sure how one would verify those assumptions. But if true, then we can't blame Debian for this odd feature - we would need to assign the blame (or accolades) to the author of the swapon command.

[ruffwoof]

Debian is surely not the only one that changes the UUID of swap.

I know I saw this swap-UUID-switch behavior in Jessie every time I did a new installation. Pretty sure in Wheezy too.

I had always assumed this "feature" (assign a new UUID to a new swap partition) was a function of the swapon command, and I further assumed the Debian installer calls the swapon command after formatting the swap partition. I'm not sure how one would verify those assumptions. But if true, then we can't blame Debian for this odd feature - we would need to assign the blame (or accolades) to the author of the swapon command.

Partition labels, as dasein highlighted, is the way to go IMO. Far easier to swap things around.

For instance /etc/fstab format something like

LABEL=seagate_yottabyte /media/yotta ext3 defaults 0 0

[HubbleT]

Debian 9 is great, returned to debian after a while off, installation was easy , everything works 100%.... except with the wifi adapters and such, always had issues with those, in every distro it is a hastle.

[ramblin]

I think Debian 9 is truly a great distro ! My goal: to swap out a few outdated W%!#@$ desktops (I will not use swear words here) to live stream a wide variety of radio and tv sites. Barely a novice in Linux I`m total newbie to Debian, I found the installation simple and went thru without a hitch. After troubleshooting some "ancient" hardware issues I was up and running. Troublesome "WIFI" and hard to install "software" was made much easier by the overwhelming support I got on my 2 threads. Just great responce. One reason I chose Debian. Now, fully configured and over 100 hours of streaming I have not had a single issue. Far exceeded my expectations. All the previous headaches with W%!#@$ GONE !! Solid preformance ! LUV it. Thanks to everyone here.

[Lysander]

. Troublesome "WIFI" and hard to install "software" was made much easier by the overwhelming support I got on my 2 threads. Just great responce. One reason I chose Debian.

Looks like you have learned how to sort things out "the Debian way" after being told off in your second thread - forum baptism by fire! Glad it's going well for you.

[jlinkels]

Yeah, it is. Unfortunately this thread already exists and this is post #59 in this thread or so. What I say does not stand out like I start a thread. But then again, it is bad etiquette to start a new thread on an identical subject.

It truly is a great distro.

I did not even know that Stretch had become stable. Shame on me! Either I have dropped off the Debian mailing list or I have skipped reading the mailing due to time constraints.

I just installed a fresh Stretch on a Dell Inspiron 5759 laptop. Dell is not the easiest hardware to install on, although it supports Ubuntu.

Anyway, the installation was flawless. I used UEFI boot with security disabled. To my big surprise, after installation the machine rebooted right into Debian. According to Dell you have to enter the BIOS again and set the default EFI boot to Linux. But apparently Debian has done it all.

The Inspiron comes standard with W10 and a whole lot of recovery and system partitions. I wiped the W10 data partition and created Linux and Swap partitions. All the other partitions I left alone. For sure the EFI partition! Not sure if I will be able to do a system restore ever in case I sell the laptop or when I have to send it back for repair.

I ignored the warnings for proprietary firmware during install. The wired network adapter worked so that was sufficient. I am not sure I am currently using the Intel VGA or the Radeon. It did not install the Radeon. If it is installed I will blacklist it in favor of Intel. The Intel is sufficient for the graphics I use and I expect a lower power consumption.

When installation was complete I installed the firmware for Intel Wifi and it picked up immediately. Sound and camera worked out of the box. Suspending as well.

I have been installing laptops from the time Sarge was Testing. And in that time it took rather a week to get everything up and running. Installing Stretch was done in less than 2 hours and I have slow Internet. Actually I did not tweak anything. Just added contrib an non-free and everything just worked (tm).

KDE5 is somewhat horrible, mimicking W10 style. Lord have mercy, I see more than enough W10 and Server 2k12 during work. And that theme IS tasteless. For the most part I was able to tweak that out except for a few things in the task bar, the Welcome screen and the splash screen. It seems that KDE5 is more usable than the first KDE4 which shipped with Debian.

I am quite happy with Debian 9 and the ease it installed on the laptop.

jlinkels

[Wheelerof4te]

Yes, Debian has improved much since my first installation of Wheezy back in 2014. On Wheezy I had to install non-free driver for my then old Nvidia card to get optimal performance. Was quite sad that nouveau on that ancient 3.2 kernel didn't cut it. Besides that, everything seemed perfect, even then. I had Office suite, a good enough popular Browser, an email client, great audio player (audacious), even better video player (vlc) and one of the best file explorers (Thunar). And thus came Jessie. My old card was blazing fast on 3.16, without non-free blobs! I felt great, I was experiencing progress right then and there. Jessie was fun, and I didn't really care much about systemd right away.

I mean, sure I was concerned about some monolithic entity consuming my user-space and constraining me just like Windows is now, but overall it felt better. I could tell my family I have found a viable solution to Windows XP EOL. Returning to the present, I find Stretch just as good, if not better than Jessie. Yeah, it had it's falls in the beginning but it has matured as all Stable versions do. I have it on one of my USB's ready to replace this Windows 10 anytime. In fact, I was pretty close to doing it the other day when Windows stuck at the update process. M$ outdone themselves with Win10 and it's updates. The only things that prevent me from switching now are better battery life and sentimentalities toward some dear people. Also, the lack of good Skype replacement for Linux.

But if you don't care about Skype or have good Linux hardware support, go for Debian Stretch. You won't regret it, not ever. It's a better OS than Windows 10 anyway.

[Lysander]

But if you don't care about Skype or have good Linux hardware support, go for Debian Stretch. You won't regret it, not ever. It's a better OS than Windows 10 anyway.

I just installed Skype via the .deb file on their site, seems to work fine but it's still Beta for Linux. I haven't tried a lot of its functionality. For people who need Skype as a business tool it may not be quite up to scratch yet on its features, I assume.

EDIT: going by this thread there are still a lot of issues with it. Maybe I should try and get the Pidgin plugin working, at least that's in the repos.

EDIT2: didn't realise Skypeweb existed. I'll just use that instead for now, purged the install.

[ormu]

Switched to Debian 9 from LMDE because it's apparently not going to receive updates anytime soon and many software are getting really outdated. So far so good, and no need to go back to Ubuntu-related distros. Also, I've always liked Debian more than RPM-based distros (Suse, Fedora CentOS).


Some annoyances during installation:

-- The installer assumed that my hardware clock is in local time even though it's not. Maybe that was because I have Windows installed too. However, I have set Windows to use UTC. This was not hard to fix, but it would be better to ask during installation, especially if Windows is present. Or check UTC time via internet and compare with the hardware clock, then make clever conclusions.

-- The "Debian desktop environment" option in the software selection dialog is ambiguous because there is also a separate option for Gnome. I saw some older threads about this too.

-- The dialog where it asks about installing GRUB to the MBR is ambiguous too. No matter what you choose, the next dialog asks to define the device where GRUB should be installed. As far as I remember, even if you choose "No", it suggests /dev/sda which implies that GRUB is going to be installed to the MBR.

[n0rthlight]

After discovering 253 spywares and telemetry bullshit on windows10 I decided to finally take the full leap to Linux. I must have tried 20 of distro some of them 2 or 3 times and stopped on Debian for 4 reasons.

-Philosophy and Ideology's
-Stability and security
-Reputation
-Everything worked! (Well but my Nivdia card but that was easy to resolve)

Thanks you for Debian 9.

[deborah-and-ian]

Yaaaaaay for Debian! <3 As always, stable and reliable.

[Han Held]

Normally Mint is my go-to Linux, but I installed Stretch in a VM and was impressed with it enough to see how it would work on my desktop.
So far, so good! Setting up Nvidia went a lot easier than I was afraid it was going to go, and having set up MATE, I don't think I'll be missing Mint.

After years in the Ubuntu wilderness it's nice to be home (even tho technically, all three are neighbors :p)

[Gaius]

The first Debian release I installed was Squeeze (6.0), in 2012 ...
... and oh boy, what fun that was.
IIRC I had to use a keyboard and mouse with a PS/2 plug for the installation, because Squeeze absolutely refused to accept the wireless versions.
Couldn't mount the optical drive without a lot of fiddling, needed to connect the screen to the mobo and install graphics card drivers after installation of Squeeze, and a hundred other small issues to make my life difficult.

So when I inserted the USB stick and rebooted to install Stretch (dual boot with Win10), I was ready for an afternoon of fun and games.

However ...
... Stretch (9.1) immediately recognized all the essentials (wireless keyboard, both screens, wired Internet, all internal and external SSDs/HDDs, even the GeForce GTX graphics card) and after manual partitioning proceeded with a completely painless installation.
All done within 20 minutes.

What a difference to 2012!

Once installed, there were no issues with configuring additional hardware. Not one. Debian's repositories are awesome these days.

Of course the OS itself works flawlessly. Fast, wonderfully stable and configurable to a fare-thee-well.
But that was to be expected, I guess ... it's Debian, after all.
And waiting for the first point release is a good idea.

Browsing the packages available for installation shows that there is absolutely no need to look at other places, Debian offers (nearly) every application one could possibly wish for.

Once I have reacquainted myself with Linux and Debian to a degree where I don't feel the need to consult or double-check with a manual before doing things and again feel comfortable about using it, I'll send Windows where the sun don't shine and switch to Debian completely.

A great big Thank You to all Debian developers, maintainers, and everybody who is (voluntarily and without payment, mind you) involved in improving it with every release.

Cheers,
Gaius