[Discussion] Debian has exceeded all my expectations

[distro-nix]

Debian became my sole distribution a month ago, but I have been using Linux since the mid-1990s. In fact, I clearly remember when Ian launched Debian and always knew the name was the combination of Deb and Ian. But alas, I never tried it. Instead I went with Mandrake and Gnome desktop (remember that?). What a clunky combination, but it's what was around in the days. I do vaguely remember trying to install Debian a decade later, but I got so many errors and didn't know how to troubleshoot it, so I gave up on it.

Fast forward to 2001, when I bought a copy of Linux Unleashed and thought I was ready to dive headlong into Red Hat. It never happened, but the huge tome taught me enough to host my own web server even to this day I run a Debian Bullseye web server without any problems.

But as for the desktop, I found EndeavourOS, as the more friendly version of Arch, but I still ran it cautiously for 3 years, as I always understood it's a rolling release model and things can break without warning. Since I don't want to be an intrepid tinkerer, spending my life fixing broken packages and holding my breath every time there is an update, so I put in place an elaborate snapshot system based on Timeshift, grub-btrfs, inotify-tools and a GUI called BTRFS Assistant. It ran well for over a year without missing a beat. Then one day Arch released an untested GRUB update, and we all know how that worked out! That is now marked in computer history as the day of the infamous Arch release of the GRUB update of 2023, which crippled me and many, many other Arch-based users. While most deserted grub and went to systemd for booting, I had been stung pretty hard and decided rolling releases are just not for me. The forums quickly offered instructions to arch-chroot into the system from a live ISO, but it never worked for me and many others I was in contact with on the forums. So all the studiously kept snapshots that were there for such an occasion were useless when I needed them most. My problem is, I began to trust that this was destiny and I was never moving, so I put all my eggs in one basket, so to speak.

Cutting-edge software might sound exciting, but even with my rigorous BtrFS snapshot system with rollback on the Grub menu, I still lost some work. So I started looking for alternatives. After a good experience with Fedora on a VM, I started reading about Fedora Silverblue: having the stability of Fedora, but with an immutable core, and this snapshot on the grub menu built in, with the added bonus, that if the new image on boot up failed, it would automatically revert to the previously working snapshot. It worked as claimed and saved me some more than once in the short time I used and experimented with it. The only problem is, I recently found Gnome Evolution as have remained loyal to Gnome DE all these years, but had always used Thunderbird. Gnome has given me such a productive workflow with minimal extensions, ddterm being my favorite, that I could never imagine using any other DE. The only real complaint I had with Silverblue is that immutable images do not allow containerized packages to have full access and since mail was my main concern, Evolution being sandboxed could not run properly on an immutable system. The only option was to layer evolution and all its dependencies into the lib-ostree, which is a no-no.

So a brand new approach was needed. I evaluated every distribution with my very specific laundry list and only 2 distributions of all Linux world emerged from my now highly curated requirements: openSUSE Tumbleweed and Debian 12. I tried Tumbleweed first and that lasted just a few days: multiple issues with printers disappearing and miraculously appearing in YaST. No drivers for the scanner, although I got sanex package working sometimes appearing as WSCL and at other times eSCL and then sometimes not even detected. I suspect firewalld was blocking peripherals, so I opened up avahi, ipp, and anythiing else, but it ultimately failed me, even thought its snapshot system is brilliant. Then I realized after getting obtuse replies from the forums, support was really only there for enterprise with SLAs and there was not much hope continuing, even though SUSE developed Snapper, which was the snapshot system that I was aiming for all along.

So it was down to Debian 12. I had at least a dozen failed attempts to install it and each time hit various fatal errors. This time I spent days researching the errors and fearlessly installing again and again, until I hit upon a brilliant YouTuber called Drew, "Debian 12 Bookworm Installation w/BTRFS/XFCE/TIMESHIFT & GRUB-BTRFS" who walked through a bare metal install almost what I was looking for, except I went with default Gnome rather than XFCE.

I must admit, installing Debian with a text-based installer was like a trip down memory lane, but the installer gave me the ability to set up my BTRFS subvolumes with the help of BusyBox, this minimal terminal emulator, but enough to do the backend preparation.

Today marks a month since I installed Debian 12 and it has not missed a beat. At first I wondered how I was going to live without Gnome 46, when I saw it ships with 43.9, but the changes have turned out to be insignificant. But I have learned ONE great lesson: it is much better to rely on tested and thoroughly vetted packages even though they may not the latest and greatest shiny new object, but at least they are rock solid stable. The only rule I did break was to not use the stable Evolution 3.46.2, as I need those newer features of the 3.52.4 (flathub). And since I am no longer constrained by an immutable core, all of Evolution's dependencies are pulled in at the same time and work as expected.

So here is what I have now: separate /home subvolume BTRFS subvolumes, Timeshift snapshots on the hour, inotify-tools, grub-btrfs for snapshots submenu on the GRUB menu. grsync on a cron job copying all the critical system directories twice a day including the separate /home directory every 2 hours, which are all stored off site.


Overall, I now realize that Debian's approach to stability is what will win the day in the Linux world and I'm on totally board with that, even if it means I don't get to play with the bleeding-edge packages, but at least I am no longer a corporation's guinea pig for packages that may never even make it into their enterprise level. If you want to recommend any further improvements, I welcome your help.

So, that's why Debian has exceeded all my expectations!

[DebianFox]

So here is what I have now: separate /home subvolume BTRFS subvolumes, Timeshift snapshots on the hour, inotify-tools, grub-btrfs for snapshots submenu on the GRUB menu. grsync on a cron job copying all the critical system directories twice a day including the separate /home directory every 2 hours, which are all stored off site.

Why do you have /home on a BTRFS? Any reason why you did not go with ext4? This is just for my knowledge.

Also having a cron job copying all the system directories twice a day can seem to be excessive. Debian system files do not change that much.

[distro-nix]

Why do you have /home on a BTRFS? Any reason why you did not go with ext4?

ext4 is well established, even though, ext4's developer said Btrfs was a better direction.

Theodore Ts'o, a key Linux kernel developer and maintainer of the ext4 filesystem, where he discussed the long-term direction of filesystems. In this context, he acknowledged that Btrfs could be seen as a more future-oriented filesystem due to its advanced features.

In 2010, during a discussion on Linux kernel development, Ts'o made a statement:

"I personally consider btrfs to be the better direction, because it's a next-generation filesystem, and it has a number of very ambitious features."

Here is his wiki Ted Ts'o Copy on Write seems to be a better approach when it some to disaster recovery.

Timeshift snapshots on the hour, inotify-tools, grub-btrfs for snapshots submenu on the GRUB menu.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Btrfs

Also having a cron job copying all the system directories twice a day can seem to be excessive. Debian system files do not change that much.

It does seem a bit excessive. So what system files would you be backing up and how often?

[DebianFox]

About the backup well in an ideal world Backup prior to an update like new kernel image being pushed. Beyond that no. Also backup the following
/boot
/
/bin
/sbin
/lib and /lib64 (unless usr-merge is not implemented based on the distro.)
/etc
/usr
/var (excluding /var/tmp and /var/log)

The purpose of backup is to go back to the last previous working state after something gets messed up. Unless there is a need for having different snapshots at various different times say for example to trace out a bug or for some other reason. Maybe a backup having the very first installation to revert back to the initial os setup. I am assuming incremental backup along with compression is used.


About the future of Btrfs yes it has a lot of potential and correct direction but has it fulfilled its potential and fully gone down the path?

[kc1di]

Nice write up enjoyed reading your journey. Thank you for posting.

[distro-nix]

I thought it was a bit rambling, but it is, what it is, but I'm glad to have landed on my last distro.
Now I need to master all of those Debian docs

[Diesel330]

I didn't read all of your post but I'm glad you figured it out after 30 years distrohopping. You don't start with Debian, you end up with it

[greenelephant]

I believe that eventually, Mint will collapse (due to vast bloat and slowness) - and Debian will rise to the top. It's surely just a matter of time.