Review: Debian 12
Debian is a project that I've used a lot over the years and it's one for which I have a lot of respect. Debian strives to be a "universal operating system", running on a wide range of architectures, on a wide range of hardware, and in a variety of roles. Debian can run on just about anything (from a phone, to a Raspberry Pi, to a server, to a laptop) and perform as a anything from a web server to a gaming machine. The fact Debian also offers both regular stable releases with five years of support and rolling branches means the distribution can be used just about anywhere. The project's famed stability and its flexible are key reasons behind Debian being the basis for over 120 actively maintained distributions.
With all of that said, while Debian is a technological and organizational achievement virtually unparalleled in the open source community, using plain Debian (as opposed to one of its many children) is not a particularly pleasant experience on a desktop computer. A big aspect of this is, as I mentioned last week in my openSUSE review, some distributions act as a unified whole, a platform that feels designed. openSUSE is a prime example of that, where all the pieces are fitted together to make something greater than the sum of their parts. Debian is toward the other end of the spectrum and the distribution feels like an uncoordinated collection of components. The pieces are all in the same room, but they don't fit together, they aren't following a shared vision. Everything feels like it's trying to follow a lowest common denominator (fitting with Debian's "universal" theme). The themes are vanilla and washed out, the desktop feels awkward to navigate and requires a lot of mouse movement, nothing is automated. Updates are checked for and applied manually, Flatpak and Flathub access need to be handled manually, and there is no central configuration panel that works across all desktop environments. We even need to grant our first user admin access manually, which brings me to the system installer.
In the past I've often pointed out that Debian's installer is awkward, slow, and unpleasant to use compared to the system installers of most other mainstream distributions. It uses about four times more screens to accomplish the same result and, as started earlier in this review, its "prompt, work, prompt, work" approach means the user is trapped interacting with it rather than entering some information and then being free to walk away. The installer also misses some popular features, such as setting the first user up as an admin, which other installers will usually provide. However, I will also acknowledge that the trade-off has been that Debian's installer has worked and worked consistently for years, largely unchanged. If you ever installed Debian 6 then you can install Debian 12 using the same steps in the same order, on either a graphical interface or a text console. The experience has been predictable and reliable.