Debian operating system

I love the idea of trying Debian but every time I try to ditch Arch for it I end up just giving up after not being able to find all the packages I need in the repos.

How do you guys deal with that? I’m not even talking about them being out of date. I’m talking about them missing altogether.

Hello everyone! It's been about a month that I'm experimenting Debian on an external disk. For the most time, I've been using Testing. The issue is, that some packages are missing from Testing, while they exist on Stable (or on Unstable). The biggest problem with that is that some packages require dependencies that don't exist on the Testing repo and as such I can't install those apps.

So, I thought about adding the Stable repo, at a lower priority. If something doesn't exist on Testing, it will grab it from Stable.

How bad is that approach? I'm not doing the reverse (using stable and grabbing apps from testing), which might be way worse. Does anyone else do that? I couldn't find anything related online.

PS. I'm a bit tempted to switch to Unstable all together, but I don't know if I'll be careful enough to use it in the long run.

PPS. I might build a home nas at some point (with Debian Stable) and keep regular backups of my laptop so that I'll be kinda safe if I ever switch to Unstable.

Morning everybody. I’ve got a server at home running Debian and I handle everything over SSH aside from file transfers for which I use webmin. I’d be trying to get Frigate working on it using Podman but couldn’t get it to find the hardware I was passing to it and got pissed off and gave up, that was a few weeks ago and everything was fine. The Podman container had its own user and I’d set it up so I couldn’t access the containers with any other users, even with sudo. I’ve gone back to it this morning and found that when i try to sudo su in (which is what I normally do) i get “This account is currently not available”. I checked everything my friendly AI hero suggested but I couldn’t figure out why it had locked. The last reference in journalctl was me closing the session and there was no records of failed logins or fail2ban being triggered. I had the ! in the shadow file and passwd was showing me an L to say it was locked. In the end I gave up trying to figure out why it had locked because I couldn’t see evidence of anything dodgy so I just went to unlock it. I’ve tried passwd -u and I’ve remember the ! and rebooted but it still won’t unlock.

I suspect Podman may have done something but I’m pretty sure I stopped the containers before I last logged off because I got sick of them filling the log files up, and though I’ve rebooted at least once in the last three weeks I don’t know if my containers are auto starting, or what that would do. I can’t even check until I’ve got the user logging on.

Anyone have any ideas?

I know it's my fault for believing what my neglected laptop told me about its battery but I went ahead an did a kernel update anyway and wound up needing to repair my system.

After a quick search I wound up on https://wiki.debian.org/GrubEFIReinstallOnLUKS per usual.

The biggest hassle of this is having to type out the longish for loop to bind the various vfs to the chroot environment. It was bad enough when it was proc/sys/dev but it's worse these days:

for i in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys /sys/firmware/efi/efivars /run; do sudo mount -B $i /mnt$i; done

I realise there are various things that'd automate that if I connected the rescue image to the internet and added a package but that's also hassles as I've really just booted it with the express purpose of reinstalling grub.

But maybe there is already some form of shortcut for this in the system that I've missed? Or some existing ticket/effort to enact one I could +1?

Small question: I am on Debian and use Gnome. I'm the only user on this laptop.

Is it possible to hide my username from the log in screen? So that only the password field shows?

The point is, my login name is my first name, and I don't like it ...

1. ... when people in public transport can see my first name when I log in
2. ...that if I lose my laptop, the people who find it can easily know my first name

I realize I could also simply pick a username that is not my first name, but it would save me a lot of reconfiguration if I could simply hide the name from the login screen.

1. for Konsole
2. for use in LibreOffice

The original font was called Albertus

I recently added an external monitor to my Debian 12 laptop, setting it as the primary display while using the laptop's monitor as secondary. However, I'm experiencing an issue where the external monitor randomly goes black, while the laptop screen continues to display normally. Moving the mouse brings the external monitor back to life. Interestingly, this happens while YouTube is running, with the audio playing uninterrupted. So far, I haven't noticed this behavior with any other applications.

Update: I was running YouTube from within the Firefox browser, not a YouTube app (If one even exists)

If anyone has a debian/windows dual-boot laptop and has been waiting until Microsoft's secureboot surprise is defused before booting into Windows, and you don't want to wait any longer, what you need is shim-signed_1.39+15.7-1_amd64.deb from bookworm-proposed-updates.

Hello everyone, I am running Debian on my home server and I also do have a raspberrpi with raspberry pi os.

When I do connect to my raspberry via ssh (with keys, not password) I do not need to enter a password when I do run a command with sudo.

Someone here can guie me on how to replicate that behaviour on Debian 12 stable?

Been daily driving Arch for 6 months now, but considering moving back to Debian. Not really taking full advantage of the Arch pros

While a bleeding-edge kernel is great, I don't particularly need it. pacman is nice, but apt gets the job done too. Has anyone else switched from Arch to @debian? If so, did you miss anything from Arch that Debian couldn't replicate?

I'm using Debian 12, KDE, in X11.

I have a 5120x1440 monitor I use with my laptop. I sometimes use my laptop display (3840x1080) when I'm undocked.

Using Wayland this generally just works. But I can't use Wayland (see below).

In X11, when I move between displays I need to change the resolution, the scale and the Task Manager height etc. It's a PITA.

This is likely a very easily solved problem. But I'm new-ish to desktop Linux and I'm unsure of how to solve it.

Any help appreciated.

(Why I can't use Wayland - it causes problems primarily for Zoom (I know, I know, it's a work thing). I assume this is because I'm also running an NVIDIA GPU on the laptop and Debian stable hasn't got those extra bits and pieces that have been added recently, in there to help make it work (that is the beauty and the curse of a stable distro like Debian 😀). As an aside I did think of trying Debian testing to see if that helped with this.

I know about the issues with Zoom, and in particular Zoom on Wayland. I use Debian 12, kernel 6.1.0-18 (Bluetooth issues on later kernels) with KDE on X11. So I primarily use the web app, which works really well on the whole.

Occasionally, I need to use the app (reasons below for clarity, but not what I'm asking about):

• When doing a presentation, for example, sharing the screen still allows you to see the other people on the call.
• Controlling somebody else's presentation in the web view just doesn't work (they can't give you control, as you don't appear in the list).

I have also tried using the Flatpak and had issues (which I cannot remember).

Whenever I use the Zoom app, using the native web app downloaded from https://zoom.us/client/latest/zoom_amd64.deb, I have weird issues when I click the chat window. The mouse pointer turns into the icon used when dragging a window and I cannot click anywhere in Zoom (none of the buttons work, keyboard shortcuts, I can't type in the chat box). But the call continues.

This has happened over and over again in different kernel versions of Debian 12 and different versions of Zoom client (I noticed this maybe 6 months or so ago, so have been regularly trying it since then).

I have searched for an answer and for something close, and have never found anything (I could be searching for the wrong thing).

Does anybody have any suggestions?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17750757

Randomly on my laptop screen this appears and debian just freezes. Sometimes these vertical lines don't appear and system freezes anyway. Its just random. How do i identify if this is hardware or software issue? and then how to identify exact piece of hardware or software causing this problem.

My laptop is an Acer A515-51-30C9 CPU: Intel Core I3-7020U GPU: Intel HD Graphics 620 OS: Debian 12 with MATE

Please, help me fix this warning.

shared from: https://lemmy.world/post/16214461

We've all heard it before: People claiming Linux isn't a viable alternative cause you can't run it without using the command line.

I decided to test that. Now there are several distros aimed at new users that have preinstalled GUI tools so you don't have to touch the Terminal. But I wanted to see if that's also possible on a distro not specifically aimed at fresh converts. The oldest distro with a large userbase, which a lot of people consider to be a "standard" Linux, is Debian, so default Debian with Gnome is what I'll use.

I consider "running an OS" to at least include booting it with full disk encryption, starting applications, connecting to a network, browsing the web, file management, installing updates and new software (both from the repos and third party sources), installing necessary drivers, setting up printing and scanning, and adjusting the looks and behaviour of the user interface.
So generally anything you'd be able to do on Windows without opening Powershell, CMD, Regedit or a text editor.

I guess I'm telling you nothing new when I say that you can install, boot, launch apps and browse the web on Debian without the command line.
It comes with a pre-installed software center, printer and scanner setup works out of the box from Gnome's settings.

Here's where it gets a little trickier: Scrolling on Firefox is rough, cause the preinstalled old version doesn't have Wayland support enabled. So you either have to enable Wayland support or install the Flatpak version of Firefox.
To enable Wayland, you have to write MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 into /etc/environment. But the file manager doesn't let you edit system files without starting it as root from the command line. To add an "edit as admin" entry to the context menu in Nautilus, you need the nautilus-admin package which isn't available in the software center. It can be installed with syaptic, a pre-installed GUI frontend for apt. But you still need to edit a system text file, which goes against the spirit of this challenge.
The other option requires enabling Flatpak for the Software Center. You can do that by installing gnome-software-plugin-flatpak using synaptic, then heading over to https://flathub.org/setup/Debian to download the flathub repo file which can be installed with a double-click and a reboot.
Note: Beginner-friendly distros ship with a newer Firefox version and Flatpak support out of the box.

Another issue is that during the boot process, you're already presented with the command line running boot messages by you, and the password prompt for the disk decryption is also on the command line. Also, the 5 second Grub countdown is kind of annoying. To make this prettier, we need to install grub-customizer, launch it and add the word splash at the end of your kernel parameters in the settings. This activates the "boot-prettifier" plymouth which is pre-installed but not activated by default. Again, pushing the boundaries of this challenge.
Note: Beginner-friendly distros come with pretty plymouth boot enabled by default.

To enable the non-free nvidia Driver, you need to enable non-free software during the GUI installation or in the Software Center settings, then install nvidia-driver from Synaptic, and reboot.
Note: Beginner-friendly distros come with a one-click NVidia driver install

To install Steam from the Debian repos, you'd need to enable Multi-Arch first, which isn't possible without the command line. Using the Flatpak version is your other option.
Note: Some beginner-friendly distros handle this for you as soon as you install a package that depends on multi-arch

tl/dr: It's possible to run and administer Debian for standard tasks without touching the command line. It's just generally faster to use the terminal if you know what you're doing.
Distros like Ubuntu, Mint, Zorin or Pop!_OS (possibly also Manjaro which I have no experience with) remove the remaining roadblocks. The only time you'll always need the command line is to fix issues you have with help from other users, because it's much, much easier to just post the right terminal commands online than to guide you through whichever GUI you might be using.
Anyone who's ever followed a Windows troubleshooting guide knows what I'm talking about.

My system seems to crash from time to time. I still don't know what causes it.

If I leave it untouched for a few hours, sometimes, it crashes.

To resume, I have to force a reboot by unplugging the power cable (not even pressing the power button for N seconds seems to work).

Then, it seems to work just fine (after displaying some error messages about lost or orphaned inodes at boot). Until, one day, it happens again. When? I never know. It seems to follow some strange and unpredictable pattern.

Where should I start investigating?

Hey guys,

Im a relatively new Linux user, so pardon the stupidity thats about to follow. I have an Asus gaming laptop on which I installed Debian 13/ testing. Everything worked well, until I tried installing new AMD drivers.

I followed this wiki article for the installation of the drivers. However after I ran the command

# apt-get install firmware-amd-graphics libgl1-mesa-dri libglx-mesa0 mesa-vulkan-drivers xserver-xorg-video-all

and rebooted my system, I was no longer able to access my Desktop ("unable to access Cinnamon session").

The good news is I can still access the terminal via Ctrl & alt & f2. However I am not able to reinstall cinnamon because I dont have network access (I think).

I might be wrong but I think thats because before rebooting I ran a VPN with killswitch enabled, which is now blocking my network access, but I have no idea how to disable this from the terminal.

Could you help a noob out to repair his system?

I would hate to reinstall and lose all my data :(

What is the best way to back up as much as possible of Debian 12 on my laptop to a server that has SSH available? I am currently backing up my users /home/ folder, but I would like to be able to nuke and restore the system from a backup.

I have ventoy on an external drive if that helps any.

P.S. I would like to be able to do incremental backups too.