I made this post about a month ago :
https://lemmy.world/post/35450797

And I've successfully gotten off windows 10 (nothing to do with the support, my life finally settled down enough for me to be able to pull the trigger). The journey :

Ubuntu Mate > Plus Studio upgrade > Checking out the Pika live boot > Ripping out Mate and installing KDE > Bazzite > Vanilla ass Debian

For now. If I find any problems I can't overcome, or miss some of the cool features of Pika, I will move to pika and stay there as it's been my favourite complete build. But I have some stories to tell.

Since I was going to all the trouble of backing up all my shit and preparing to start from ground zero, I looked ahead and got a couple distros to go hoppin'. From the recs I had :

• Bazzite
• Pika
• Just stick to ubuntu or derivatives
• And through inference, debian. Because fuck it, since ubuntu and ubuntu derivatives are basically debian+ , and I'm nuking this fucker, might as well try that too. After all, if I can't hack it, I'll just install a different linux.

Backstory time : I've been on linux a few times before, though only ubuntu itself in the late 00s, mint in the mid 10s and dropped out eventually due to hardware failures and whatnot. I'm currently a programmer and both my skills , availability of internet knowledge on linux and accessibility of linux itself, horrificness of the world as a whole have converged to a point where I feel like it's finally time to go back.

The reason why I waited so long for this computer from '18 to have linux on it is that IRL has made me depend on my current computer not shitting a brick. I'm talking migrations etc.

Anyway, story time :

I installed the ubuntu mate I had to hand (wife had some old, slow ass computers that needed it), and off I went to the races. On the Ubuntu Studio site I saw that any version could "become" ubuntu studio through a gui based install pack, so I upgraded that way. I tried to tinker with the GUI to make it a bit more the way I'd like it to be, and got tired of my configs getting nuked every time I didn't save the settings correctly or whatever. I also had to do some tinkering to make it run the GPU in games, and had to fiddle to get some steam games to run properly (Fallout 3, Hunnie Pop) but once I got the graphics card sorted, Haven and Snakey Bus ran quite well.

At the moment my perspective on MATE GUI is that it sucks. It is rock solid and dependable on my wife's daily driver which has been on there for a long while now, ever since her tower got bricked, and more power to anyone who made it work. I couldn't.

Also, shoutout to @spex@lemmy.world for the rtcqs rec, it makes it really easy to check what I need for good sound performance. I was able to configure most of the things I needed and I get good enough peformance (so far) on the systems I try it on.

I'm not sure in which order the next two things happened.

I got bored and fed up of mate, and wanted to move on to the next adventure. for a kick, I decided to try replacing the GUI before I left. I followed some instructions on how to install KDE and some on how to remove MATE. I did it and got surprised at how easy it is. Then I ran signal and found out the encryption keys needed to be switched once I started using KDE, and oh well. 95% win , and I really enjoy KDE. Before, I thought I was more of a gnome guy, and didn't like KDE very much. Now, it's the opposite. KDE 4 lyf, KDE connect is fucking awesome and I haven't even scratched the surface of it.

I tried the liveboot of pika. I REALLY like the hardware manager, and KDE base, and it's promising. I have some doubts about how old the community and whatnot is, but I really like how friendly it seems.

Next, I wanted to try Bazzite, since I wanted to try a gaming OS and one of the recommendations. Install was a bit shaky compared to ubuntu, but I was distracted doing other stuff so for now we'll say it's 50/50 blame wise. I had to do absolutely zero config whatsoever for anything and snakeybus and haven ran perfect from minute zero. I tried to apt install something and it told me that apt was not allowed, and the following on the wiki link it gave :

Fedora Atomic Desktops have read-only root files to prioritize stability. Therefore, containerized applications that do not interfere with your host system will work best.

Package formats ranked from most recommended to least recommended for daily usage:

rpm-ostree (System-Level Packages) - Layer Fedora packages at a system-level (not recommended, use as a last resort)

My gut reaction was "Buddy I'm drunk as I want, and I'll kill this OS with my incompetency if I want". Also, all the investment I felt I had with the minimal command line usage and way I've picked up so far on how to do stuff made me not want to stay on bazzite.

It sounds like I dislike bazzite, or that I don't appreciate the rec, far from it. It made me feel that the main branches of linux (as I see them) of Debian, Fedora, Arch and Gentoo were distinct enough for me to have developed an actual preference for debian itself, instead of just its derived noob friendly forms. Maybe as I get better grips as a programmer and Debian user I'll want to brave Arch and Gentoo ; but at the moment I really , really appriciate getting to try Bazzite/fedora, and seeing that immutable, fedora based OSes are not something that I mesh well with, for now.

Now for the actual fun story that made me want to write this long, boring post.

The next day after installing bazzite, I wanted to move on to the next OS. I figured with the live boot playing I did, if I wanted to settle down, it was going to be with Pika. I really, really like how friendly it is, how explicit it is in GUI about what's being used, what drivers what hardware has, etc etc. So; if I were to try out raw ass debian, this was going to be my shot, as I don't think I'll move off pika if I get on it.

Pop in the USB stick, launch the gui install. The button layouts threw me off a bit (to the point where I was confused about if I had set the wrong resolution) , but it connected to wifi fine, and I eventually got the improved reformatting of the drive done. All right. Maybe it's just the installer, I should be happy to get a friendly enough GUI installer with WIFI capabilities. Finish the install "Remove media and reboot" sure.

System Reboots. All I get is the command prompt as if I'm running dos on a windows 3.1 machine. Da fuq?! Sure enough vanilla ass debian comes with fucking nothing apparently. But, here's the fun part, because I manually decided to rip out MATE before nuking it from orbit, I know that I can just install KDE with no trouble ... hopefully. I have no idea what the fuck else debian didn't come with, maybe I'll have to manually install drivers for everything under the sun too. Reboot again, bam. Sexy KDE UI the way I got used to like a week ago.

Some snags though; the network interface is there, but no wifi... but I'm connected to the internet? Turns out I need to remove the setup for that from somewhere. Gotta install the NVidia drivers, no way to manually select which graphics card is active through gui, but, games seem to be using the 3d card when they need it. Great. Hunnie Pop and Fallout 3 (which didn't run on windows 10 or Ubuntu) are doing great. Snakey Bus and Haven are great too, as usual.

I got some midi input showing through piano booster, but the UI is all fucked up , I used rtcqs and audacity to check multi track recording, however tenacity is fucked (until I try harder with rtcqs to fix the problems it has), I have yet to try OBS, but the fundamentals seem to be there.

For now, I think I can enjoy being on Vanilla Ass Debian at least as a learning experience for a while, especially if I look around for hardware managers similar to pika. If I can't hack it, I have a USB with pika on it ready to go.

I got inspired to write this long ass post because it was funny to me that the raw install of debian has no window manager, and to thank all the people that gave me recs; specifically :

• @spex
• @Tuuktuuk@sopuli.xyz (thanks for reminding me that it's debian all the way down)
• @LostWanderer@fedia.io (thanks for the anti-recommendation of Cachy/Arch
• @TragicNotCute@lemmy.world (Bazzite was worth a shot, not for me, but opened my eyes and really helped see my own capabilites and preferences)
• @janNatan@lemmy.ml (for recommending I try ubuntu anyway, which led me to experimenting more, leading to installing KDE manually)
• @Fizz@lemmy.nz (Pika is GOATed, and if I fail here, I'm moving there forever... hopefully)
• You for reading this

Fuck it, watch a dumb video if you want. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fVAIZkIV7Q (Dankpods/Dankmus makes a ramshackle computer and shoves bazzite on it)