First look into Debian 10

Debian 10 was released in mid 2019. Installing it on a virtual machine make sense, but the more interesting idea is to install it on a phyical notebook. I have done so and it works reasonable well. The most obstacle was the installation proecudure itself. After booting the USB stick, the user has the choice between a Gnome based installer, a graphical installer and a text install. I have choosen the graphical installer but it was a bit complicated to browse through the options. After a bit reading the manual an installation was possible, but especially newbies will find the installer difficult to use.

The more elaborated way is the modern gnome based installer. Which works better but needs more system ressources. In the next installation it is the better choice. After the system was installed on the PC the first bootup was using the wrong graphics settings. The user has to manual install the non-free driver which fits to the graphics card. Selecting the correct package has to be done manual. That means, the user has to know that the resolution problem can be solved with a non -free driver and then he has to read the wiki section to identify which driver needs to be installed. Similar to the installation software this step is a bit hard for newbies.

After mastering the step the system runs great. All the programs are available which means that firefox, Spreadhseet programs, python 3 and all the other open source software runs out of the box. The system requirements are on the same level like in Fedora and Arch LInux, which means that an idle PC will need around 2 GB of RAM and the Debian OS occupies around 15 GB on the harddrive. Compared to early Linux systems for example slackware the hardware requirements are high, but in comparison with Windows 10 it's a midsize system with moderate requirements.

What is important to know that before the user will accept the Debian philosophy he has to understand the advantages of a stable system over a rolling release distribution. If the user isn't familiar about the details of git branches and how a stable branch is monitored for security issues, he won't like the Debian philosophy very much. The reason is, that a short look into the version history of all the software will show, that Debian is outdated. Firefox is obsolete since 6 months, the Linux kernel is an older one and Python is not the current version.

The main advantage of Debian over other Linux distributions is, that all the Debian users have installed the same software. On 2020-04-27 it Debian 10.3 which means, that the user will need for exactly this version a handbook, security patches and updates. This makes it more likely that after installing an update the system will run without interruption. In contrast, the situation at Gentoo Linux and Fedora is, that every user has installed a slightly different Linux system which makes it hard to trace errors back. Therefor, Debian has much in common with Windows 10 in which all the users have installed the same version. This is important to blame the right opponent. That means, if the user has installed Debian 10.3 already, and something isn'T working it the fault of the Debian project but not of the single user.