Edit: It works! Not beautiful and shows a concerning amount of “Error” lines on startup but it will do. I got VSCodium and ESP-IDF running, at least – and CMake isn’t awfully slow despite it being a crappy 4GB RAM machine (not easily upgradeable). The first boot took a while and I haven’t rebooted since, I guess it will be below 30 seconds next time (Mint on same machine but HDD was about 1 minute).
Edit: I hope I chose the right kernel here, surprisingly not much info online on this! Also, I picked “targeted” because the 10-year-old system does not use any cutting-edge hardware and all drivers should be auto-detected, I think.
After some experience with Linux Mint, I gathered the courage to try another distro. I’d like to turn an old laptop into an IPTV receiver plus FTP/OpenVPN/HomeAssistant server with occasional desktop use. I first installed Windows 11 just in case my family needs to use it (it fucking sucks, the built-in PS/2 keyboard doesn’t work half the time but that’s an issue for later) but now I’ll be turning it into a dual-boot setup with Debian as the primary option. Please give me some encouragement, I’m really afraid of new things.
Old pic: https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/d4bf0222-4fc1-42ab-a3e9-464087dec3af.png
I had a fair amount of issues back in the day due to debian having limited support for newer hardware with proprietary drivers. I wouldnt be surprised if that still a thing given Debian’s modus operandi.
Debian now prompts users if they want non free drivers in the installer, and the installer it self comes with them so it can boot on platforms that require it, non free drivers and firmware are also in a seperated repository to non-free and enabling them is independent, selecting non free drivers in the installer will enable the non free driver and firmware repository
Good question. It seems like Debian has been speeding up a bit. The software is still a bit older, but it’s not too far behind compared to some other Debian releases. I switched and it’s been rock solid, despite me running a Trixie Backports system.