Hello Debian 11

For the last few years, I’ve been using Linux as my main OS on almost all my PCs, with some brief dalliances with FreeBSD and macOS. Recently, my ancient desktop PC has been sorely in need of a stable and customizable Linux distribution. After numerous hopping between distros, I finally settled on Debian.

For the past few months Debian 10 has been running my desktop and has given me nary a problem. Everything works perfectly, and it runs on fumes with almost no memory usage when compared to beefier desktop environments such as GNOME.

Using XFCE as my desktop environment has also been refreshing, it’s snappy and stable with sane defaults for most of its apps. It’s the perfect partner to Debian’s slow, but stable, release schedule.

Last weekend, the latest and greatest releaser of Debian came out, and I hopped on the upgrade bandwagon. It was fast and simple to upgrade. All I had to do was edit a text file and run a few simple commands, and I was running the latest release.

I had only one problem in that my volume would be muted when resuming from suspend or lock. Somehow, ALSA or Pulseaudio wouldn’t remember my previously set volume level. No problem, though, as it gave me an excuse to do a fresh installation.

After an hour or two, I have a perfectly running and customized system that still runs perfectly. I cannot imagine not using Debian 11 as my main OS for the next few years.

I’m publishing this as part of 100 Days To Offload. You can join in yourself by visiting https://100daystooffload.com.

• Tech