I’ve been spending this Sunday sifting through YouTube watching various technology videos. Some of them were posted by Chris Titus. I’ve included one of them in this post below. It was this post that I followed to install, in yet another virtual machine, Debian. But not just bog standard Debian. I followed Chris Titus’ directions mostly and in the process installed a version of Debian (bookworm/sid) with the Cinnamon desktop and managed to create a version of Debian that looks nearly identical to regular Linux Mint. What makes this VM of Debian so interesting is that it’s almost indistinguishable from regular Linux Mint, especially after I installed Papirus and selected the Papirus-Dark icons, and selected and activated the Adapta-Nokto theme. These icons and theme are what I have on my regular Linux Mint system.
After installation and setup, I checked the tools I care about that were installed and found them to be up-to-date with Fedora 36 and 37, even more up-to-date than the latest Ubuntu. In fact the Linux kernel is at version 6, which is just a few minor revisions behind Fedora’s kernel version 6.0.8. Close enough. In fact I’m going to keep an eye on this particular Debian VM for the foreseeable future to determine if I should switch (yet again) to this.
This isn’t the first time I’ve followed a Chris Titus YouTube video. It was his video on how good KVM/QEMU that got me to using it on my Linux Mint system. And his videos on what he thinks is happening at Twitter are informative and hilarious. And I happen to agree with his opinions on Twitter.
It was a lot of fun following along and I learned a bit in the process. Frankly, this is one of the clearest and best explained, and one of the best looking, customization installations based on Debian.
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Links
Link to Debian ISO used in the video: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/weekly-builds/amd64/iso-cd/
Link to Papirus: https://github.com/PapirusDevelopmentTeam/papirus-icon-theme#debian-and-derivatives
Note about Papirus. Their GitHub site has directions for installing on Debian. Follow those directions, not the ones available on obscure web pages claiming to be Linux technical sources.
Radarwitch
I partly agree here with Titus – this *is* an easy and fast way to install Debian testing (if you want that), and then change it to “Sid” (unstable). Plus he prefers the Mint look here which is okay, choice is always good.
The question is whether you really want “Sid” or even testing as a beginner. None of them gets security updates, and while Sid will always have the latest and greatest packages after a while (some go to experimental first), there’s still a reason why “Sid” is called “Sid” – it’s that unstable boy from the neighbourhood who likes to break toys, which is *not* what a beginner might want to do IMO.
“Normal” Debian might look outdated to some, but really, for normal people does it really matter to always have the latest and greatest? With newer hardware you’d need newer kernels which is why backports exist, so I’d call this Titus way of installing Debian the best one for nerds or for people who’d want Arch (or any other “rolling release distro) but with Debian packaging.
I’m using bullseye backports, and like you I’m now on kernel 6.0.3 – which is fine for my relatively new AMD Ryzen 7 5700G system. I’m using the same stable Debian on an old Celeron-based notebook with only 2GB of RAM, so there it’s XFCE instead of Gnome, and that one runs nicely too.
But thanks for the video embed anyway – didn’t know Titus before, and that has been interesting.
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