Category: computer

The headline basically says it all. I had to slightly shrink one of the partitions, then I installed “Bookworm”, and switched both my environment and also my web page back to a lighter theme for now. So my desktop looks like this now:

Like always, thanks for reading.

P.S.: added a dark/light mode switcher which floats in the bottom right of the page. Enjoy.

Due to the installation of GrapheneOS on the Pixel 3a, and thinking about security in general – also on the desktop – I switched Debian back to using Wayland instead of X.Org. That works well, unless you have to work with screen capturing which would additionally require pipewire.

And because I also make music with my PC and until now heavily rely on Jack, I decided to try Debian’s upcoming version named “Bookworm”, or, in repository talk, “testing”. So I set up a virtual machine to try it. In case you’ll also want to do that, you can find the installer here.

So, after staring up a virtual machine with that installer, you’re greeted with something like this:

I decided to *not* use the selected Grahical Install but the “normal” and old-fashioned Install just below it. That’s text (ncurses) based, and looks like this while working:

And, after downloading some stuff which was not included or newer than in the downloaded installer, you’re rebooting into it like this:

And, after a few seconds, you’ll see the few initial (one time) configuration steps, like this:

And that’s pretty much it – takes some 10 minutes from starting the installer until here, and most of that time is spent downloading stuff you don’t already have.

And yes, my first check was whether screen capture works with Wayland (and now pipewire), which it does. Further checks will have to be done elsewhere, since audio recording is pretty much a realtime task, and thus not very well suited inside of virtual machines.

But anyway, I’m looking forward to using the upcoming “Bookworm” – when it moves from “testing” into “stable” later this year. Looking at the open RC (release-critical) bugs, it might already be more stable than stable… 😉

Like always, thanks for reading.

After reading so often about Linux Mint lately – see for instance my post from yesterday about Liam from The Register – I decided to try and have a look at it, which I haven’t done in quite a while. Not that I’d need something else than Debian, but I always recommended Ubuntu for beginners or for people switching from other operating systems, and maybe by now there are indeed better choices?

Well, I had a short look only, but I must say that indeed, Mint looks like a thing of beauty:

I gave the virtual machine only 2 cores, and 4 GB of RAM plus 16GB on the SSD, but it ran everything I tried beautifully:

Mint is still based upon Ubuntu, at least this version is/was (I think I’ve read of an alternative one which is based upon Debian, but wanted to try the default one) – so it’s hard to say after only a short time which is better. But everything looked very well laid out, there’s even a firewall which you can switch on with a simple mouse click, and I think that new Linux users would have no problems getting around this; the Cinnamon desktop looks much more like Windows than for instance Gnome does. Plus it didn’t take too many resources, that virtual machine used only some 800MB of the 4GB of RAM I’d given it.

So, in case you’re interested in trying a Linux distribution and don’t know which one, I’d still say try Ubuntu because of the huge user base, but Linux Mint is probably even easier, so take that into your consideration as well – especially now that Ubuntu seems to split to a paid support model for companies, Mint looks more like the end-user friendly variant to me.

Like always, thanks for reading. And now, back to my Debian: