Install Buster v10.10 stable or Bullseye v11 prerelease?

[ant]

Hello.

I'll be redoing my Debian stable installation and setup on a newer used PC this long American weekend to replace my old Debian Jessie v8 (not going to bother to do upgrades since it's a mess and very old in its 115 GB SSD). Should I use current Buster v10.10 stable or get Bullseye v11 prerelease (stable enough yet?) so I can skip its major OS upgrade? I will not be testing since it will be my production machine.

Thank you for reading and hopefully answering soon.

[MALsPa]

Hm. I first installed Bullseye back in February, and now I've got four Bullseye installations here. I haven't seen any issues. I get the feeling that Bullseye is very close to moving to Stable. I personally would not install Buster at this point.

[ticojohn]

I've been using Buster for a couple of years and still have it on one drive. Rock solid. I also have Bullseye installed on three drives and have yet to have any significant issues. Certainly nothing that wasn't easily resolved. Make sure you read all the errata on Bullseye before installing just to make sure there isn't something that may be an issue with your particular hardware. Not likely, but possible. There is some newer hardware that could be problematic but it sounds like you might have older (as in not the newest and shiniest) hardware so it shouldn't be a problem. I am very pleased with Bullseye although since it is in pre-release there are pretty regular updates (as in once or twice a week). I would personally go with Bullseye. I'm sure you realize you can't upgrade directly from Jessie to Bullseye, so you will either need to first upgrade to Buster and then to Bullseye, or take the best approach and just do a fresh install on Bullseye. An upgrade to Buster then to Bullseye will be better for preserving your system (eg installed programs) but will be a lot more time consuming. I upgrade from Buster on two drives and did a fresh install on the third. In any case be sure to at a minimum back up your /home directory. The other wiser and more knowledgeable people here can probably give you additional advice. But for whatever it's worth that's my two cents worth.

[Hallvor]

"Newer" is probably the magic word for Bullseye. It is awesome, by the way.

[Bulkley]

Bullseye seems to work well. The only problem I have found is that one of my favorite programs has been deprecated and I have yet to find a suitable replacement. So, my suggestion is that you run a live version and try everything you can think of. As you are coming from Jessie you may find some surprises.

[ant]

My used desktop PC is over a decade old so Debian should fully support all. So go for Bulleye v11? Should I use https://gemmei.ftp.acc.umu.se/cdimage/b ... etinst.iso installer is good or should I use something newer? When it finally goes stable, do I have to change anything to keep it at stable? I'm only interested in stability. Since this will be a brand new install, I might as well get Bullseye and not wait for its public stable release.

[ant]

Bullseye seems to work well. The only problem I have found is that one of my favorite programs has been deprecated and I have yet to find a suitable replacement. So, my suggestion is that you run a live version and try everything you can think of. As you are coming from Jessie you may find some surprises.

I do expect major changes like no more DenyHosts.

[pcalvert]

Bullseye seems to work well. The only problem I have found is that one of my favorite programs has been deprecated and I have yet to find a suitable replacement.

May I ask which program that is? Perhaps there is a solution that would allow you to keep using it (at least for a year, or maybe even longer).

Phil

[Bulkley]

May I ask which program that is? Perhaps there is a solution that would allow you to keep using it (at least for a year, or maybe even longer).

Thanks, Phil. Radiotray. I stream radio going in the background whenever I sit down at my desk. The closest to it are Goodvibes (lousy menu) and Radiotray forks Radiotray-ng , Radiotraylite and Radiostation which I haven't been able to install on Debian. (I got ng to run on MX.) I have a suspicion that all of them were built by *buntu users with dependencies Debian doesn't use. Maybe I'm wrong.

I've looked into how to repackage radiotray_0.7.3-6_all.deb so that it can work on Bullseye but so far it's a job over my head.

BTW, I run Openbox/tint2 and a fairly light setup.

[sunrat]

I have also been running Bullseye since February and am very happy with it. Would not contemplate an upgrade from Jessie, new install for sure. If you install now, the default sources.list should have "bullseye" rather than "testing" so should be fine for its lifetime.
Personally, I would use the current RC1 netinstall which works best with an ethernet connection. nonfree images including firmware are also available which might enable installing over wifi if you're lucky. I prefer to install only required firmware after installing the OS.
https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/

The only program I really miss which has been dropped since Buster is Spek, an audio spectrogram image generator. It can't even be built from source as it depends on unavailable GTK2 libs. I have found an adequate alternative by generating a spectrogram image with sox.

[craigevil]

May I ask which program that is? Perhaps there is a solution that would allow you to keep using it (at least for a year, or maybe even longer).

Thanks, Phil. Radiotray. I stream radio going in the background whenever I sit down at my desk. The closest to it are Goodvibes (lousy menu) and Radiotray forks Radiotray-ng , Radiotraylite and Radiostation which I haven't been able to install on Debian. (I got ng to run on MX.) I have a suspicion that all of them were built by *buntu users with dependencies Debian doesn't use. Maybe I'm wrong.

I've looked into how to repackage radiotray_0.7.3-6_all.deb so that it can work on Bullseye but so far it's a job over my head.

BTW, I run Openbox/tint2 and a fairly light setup.

You might try Shortwave or Streamtuner2.
Shortwave has a flatpak: https://flathub.org/apps/details/de.hae ... .Shortwave
Streamtuner2 is in the Debian repos.

[Bulkley]

You might try Shortwave or Streamtuner2.

Thanks, craigevil. I have looked at those several times but they both look like overkill to me. The closest one, the one that does install in Bullseye is Goodvibes. I like it except for the menu which is a single column. It does not allow for sub menus which makes the single column very tall. I have tried several times to reconfigure the menu with no success.

What makes Radiotray and Good vibes so neat and minimal is that they use streaming url's, not web pages.

I'll keep banging away at this. Eventually I'll find a solution. Maybe it will be a CLI radio player.

[ant]

I have also been running Bullseye since February and am very happy with it. Would not contemplate an upgrade from Jessie, new install for sure. If you install now, the default sources.list should have "bullseye" rather than "testing" so should be fine for its lifetime.
Personally, I would use the current RC1 netinstall which works best with an ethernet connection. nonfree images including firmware are also available which might enable installing over wifi if you're lucky. I prefer to install only required firmware after installing the OS.
https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ ...

Thanks. I haven't clean installed the new Debian yet since my crazy life got in the way. Argh! I hope to retry during this long American weekend (happy birthday, USA)! I see there's a v11 RC2 and its public stable is coming out later this month (maybe I should wait until then?)? Are you saying I shouldn't use debian-10.10.0-amd64-netinst.iso, but use firmware-bullseye-DI-rc2-amd64-netinst.iso instead? I do have over decade old hardwares that need third party drivers like my NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT (512 MB of VRAM) video card.

Dang. I screwed up my version numbers in my old posts so I had to fix them.

[CwF]

Establish a birth place! A master hypervisor.
I'm at the point now that even the hypervisor, all vm's, all releases came from the same mother, Jessie! I've installed Debian 5 times. Dozens spawned from 2 of those 5. My first 8.0 is now 10.x. It made one 8.8 Amd64 vm's from which all amd64's up to the current pre11x is derived. The replacement bullseye hypervisor came from that install. I installed 9.2 i386 and have made many, but fewer iterations from it. I too have a closet of high end P3 stuff in need of Debian, and no time for fun...
The last 5-6 bare metal machines I've built for Debian, their ssd's received this same image, uniquified for purpose. It's very nice to have a new machines virgin boot go straight into a fully configured system. It's way easier... My 5th install was to investigate a number of upgrade issues, it was a bullseye RC. I didn't like the merged mess, I found what I needed and noted the issues, and deleted it...back to 4 lifetime installs.
So, an empty promise maybe since my way is at the other side of lots of details - Install whatever you have because it doesn't matter. All can equally become your own personal golden image.
...and it's not easy, but it is!

[NFT5]

Are you saying I shouldn't use debian-10.10.0-amd64-netinst.iso, but use firmware-bullseye-DI-rc2-amd64-netinst.iso instead? I do have over decade old hardwares that need third party drivers like my NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT (512 MB of VRAM) video card.

I have two desktop PCs on my desk. AMD FX8350 with GT710 and Ryzen 1600AF also with GT710 graphics. Although the Ryzen is new (to me) it's tech is not and the FX8350, although top of the range in its day, is also older tech. Add that to the need for lots of firmware to make these things run right.

In every machine I have dual boot option so that I can still use it if I manage to bork something. At times like this I keep the older installation (Debian 10) in place while I install and try out the newer (now Debian 11). Particularly with the FX machines (I have 4, scattered around) getting the installations right was always difficult with Debian 10, until I changed to the Backports 5.10 kernel. Been rock solid stable since then. Of course, Debian 11 already has the later kernel and installs like a dream, or rather, a memory, because it hasn't been so easy since Wheezy.

So, my recommendation is to go with Bullseye. Even though it's still at RC stage the base system is very stable and I've noticed only a few, very minor, issues with some GUI programs. It doesn't matter whether you install from an RC1 or RC2 CD - it will update everything from the repositories during installation. Definitely use the CD that has firmware already on it. You will probably need to add more, but it makes the installation process much smoother.