First-time trying Debian, and it's awesome!

[Espionage724]

I started out on Ubuntu 6.06, and eventually went to Fedora somewhere in the 20s. I juggled a bit between the latest Fedora, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Ubuntu releases and found I generally preferred Fedora and liked SELinux, so I've been using the latest 39 release primarily on my server and laptop up until recently. I've been running into some odd instability with GNOME sometimes not continuing past the log-in screen on F39, and generally didn't like the latest oS TW and Ubuntu 23.10 releases for other issues. I've found Windows 10 LTSC 21H2 the best OS on my laptop for now, and can still admin my F39 server with WSL no problem.

I'm looking to relocate and wanted to put my server on a VPS, and Vultr has a free tier program. It's only 512MB of RAM, and I figured since I only use about 150MB maybe average, that'd be fine.

- First was Fedora Server: Got a text screen saying something fatal about iscsi failing. A quick search led to I think Stack Exchange where some person somehow figured they had too-little RAM as the real issue. RHEL 9's iso didn't even attempt to boot. Fedora 39's net installer failed the same iscsi error.

- openSUSE Tumbleweed: Could not detect a network connection for neither the DVD nor net installer. The installer wouldn't proceed seemingly and would stop early-on with showing a network error.

- Ubuntu 23.10: Net Installer would crash randomly. One time it was when I was selecting the language. Once during mirror checking. Once after I sped through the settings, it crashed on partitioning.

So the 3 distros I was used to switching between all failed to install on this low-memory VPS.

I figured Ubuntu was close to Debian and never really gave Debian a try back when I was trying other distros like Arch and Solus. I've also generally heard that Debian had outdated software in the repos and that didn't sound appealing. So since about 2006 until now, I never tried Debian, but have heard of it.

I searched Debian, clicked the first option with Downloads, and right there was the net installer link. I copied/pasted that into Vultr's ISO manager, booted it, and just for kicks selected Graphical mode. I'm loving that the installer automatically booted into low-mem mode! I went through the prompts slowly, eventually had some graphical glitches appear but could still read and proceed in the installer, and installed Debian! I detached the ISO, and it booted to a log-in prompt!

I guess my server will be running Debian, and so far I like what I'm seeing of it! The first thing I searched about was sudo, and I like the wiki new user note for it :p I don't expect a LEMP stack to be an issue on Debian since I had it on Ubuntu, but I'll have to get familiar with a few things coming from a while with RHEL-style.