Thinking of trying out Debian

[Cecil]

As the title says, I'm thinking of trying out Debian with the KDE desktop. This is mainly to get me out of my comfort zone and maybe learn some new things. Anything I should be aware or watch out for of before I "take the plunge"?

[dibl]

Debian stable? It won't make you uncomfortable at all. There's a helpful user forum if you hit any snags, but first check the wiki.

[vinnywright]

I have Debian-8-KDE as one of the 5 OS's this box can boot to ,,,,,,,,,,it is just fine

about like Kubuntu-14.04

VINNY

[Cecil]

I have Debian-8-KDE as one of the 5 OS's this box can boot to ,,,,,,,,,,it is just fine

about like Kubuntu-14.04

VINNY

By By Kubuntu 14.04, I'm guessing you mean with KDE 4 instead of 5. A bit disappointing, as I like 5, but not too big a deal. How hard would it be to upgrade to KDE 5 on Debian?

[vinnywright]

By By Kubuntu 14.04, I'm guessing you mean with KDE 4 instead of 5. A bit disappointing, as I like 5, but not too big a deal. How hard would it be to upgrade to KDE 5 on Debian?

I am not sure ,,,I am no Debian guru ,,,,,,,but I think sid ,,,(unstable) has it ,,,,,but not sure

@dibl would know however ,,,,,,,,or google it .

yes it is plasma4,,,,,,,,Debian-8-KDE that is

VINNY

[Cecil]

I am not sure ,,,I am no Debian guru ,,,,,,,but I think sid ,,,(unstable) has it ,,,,,but not sure

@dibl would know however ,,,,,,,,or google it .

yes it is plasma4,,,,,,,,Debian-8-KDE that is

VINNY

Yeah, did some looking, and I'm going to install it on my laptop (which isn't my main machine) and upgrade to Debian-Testing to check it out. I'll likely stick with Kubuntu for my main desktop, though, I'm just still in my "Lets see what this has to offer" phase.

[dibl]

You can try plasma 5 by installing Debian testing or unstable. I run unstable, via siduction. But it can be a little, ummm .... unstable, at times, although it is pretty solid at the moment. Plasma 5 has come a long way since its early version, and is approaching a usability level similar to KDE 4. I'd say, give siduction a try, see if you can tolerate the occasional challenge, and if that's too much for you, you can always drop back to testing.

[woodsmoke]

To me there is not a "problem" with Debian, I've installed it with KDE and commented that it did not "feel" right and had others say that "Kubuntu is just Debian with KDE" but still aver.

It works great, etc., but there may be repos that you need to add, you will certainly need to add codecs, etc, might have to go through the printer setup to install printers.

VERY security conscious in terms of passwords and KDEwallet type things...

But otherwise the important thing is that it is all debs and you can use synaptic.

woodsmoke

[dibl]

... there may be repos that you need to add, you will certainly need to add codecs, etc, might have to go through the printer setup to install printers.

... the important thing is that it is all debs and you can use synaptic.

For unstable, it is advisable to stay with apt and do installations and updates at the run level formerly known as "init 3", now known as "multi-user.target". For testing and stable, using synaptic in X is fine.

I use only three repos for normal daily work:

1. Debian unstable:

# debian loadbalancer
deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
#deb-src http://http.debian.net/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free

2. Siduction:

# official siduction-lists

deb http://mirror.lug.udel.edu/pub/siduction/extra unstable main
#deb-src http://packages.siduction.org/extra unstable main

deb http://mirror.lug.udel.edu/pub/siduction/fixes unstable main contrib non-free
#deb-src http://packages.siduction.org/fixes unstable main contrib non-free

3. Debian multimedia:

# debian dmo list
deb http://www.deb-multimedia.org sid main non-free
#deb-src ftp://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/debian-multimedia/ unstable main

Most of the proprietary firmware for wifi is in the debian non-free repos -- there's an extensive wiki about that here.

If you want the native firefox rather than iceweasel, there's a nightly builds repo that some folks use -- I don't. Besides I read last week that Mozilla has agreed to let Debian use their brand so that issue is going obsolete.

Once in a great while (hasn't happened lately) the version numbering of packages in the DMO repo gets out of sequence with the same packages in unstable and causes a problem in which you have to comment out DMO and wait a bit before upgrading, but that is easily done.

Hplip works just fine for installing and supporting HP printers, including those like my P1606dn that need a downloaded plugin.

[GreyGeek]

Jumping to Debian is a jump to the mother-ship. I tried Debian Jessie KDE. It wasn't stable because they were mixing Plasma4 and Plasma5 stuff without testing. Things like "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade" would bork the DE. Since Debian KDE is moving to Plasma5 I took it off my goto list and uninstalled it as a guest OS.
I've been using KDE since the 1.0 beta on SuSE 5.3 in September of 1998. Sadly, unless the KDE dev crew can create a theme which mimics Plasma4, or makes it an option during the install, I will probably be moving to Mint's Cinnamon.

[dibl]

It's been 6 months since I saw a KDE 4 desktop so the details are fading, but .... For Plasma 5 I like the oxygen desktop theme, oxygen widgets, oxygen team icons, oxygen widget style, air-oxygen-color window decorations, and clearlooks/adwaita for the few gtk2/3 apps that I use, with oxygen icons for gtk apps, on 4 virtual desktops. It doesn't look terribly different than how I remember KDE 4 looking.

[woodsmoke]

nice post dlbl

woodsmoke

[dibl]

Here you go == I dunno whether it looks like KDE 4 or not. You can decide.

[vinnywright]

Debian-8-KDE ,,,, ya KDE 4



@GG I do not see a mix of plasma4 and 5 hear and this is vary stable ,,,,,,,, perhaps you had added unstable to your sources ?

VINNY

[woodsmoke]

Both of youse guys are such kewl coders!

woodsmoke