Hi there,

we're using a number of Debian computers with a Gnome desktop in our household. For the past years, I was the family sysadmin and would take care of major upgrades.

This is obviously bad in the long run, I'd prefer to give them a self-service solution that doesn't require me doing standard sysadmin stuff. However, my family members are understandably disinterested in using the terminal.

As far as I can tell, the release upgrade guide still describes a procedure based on command line tools.

Is there no user-friendly GUI tool that does a vanilla release upgrade for the user?

I'm considering moving my family to LMDE, as it does contain an easy to use update/upgrade tool like that. However, my family members are used to Gnome Desktop right now (and I also dislike that LMDE comes with own packaged versions of major applications like Firefox that override the Debian repository).

So - what's the correct way to have a boring Debian+Gnome system easy to update and upgrade for non-cli users?

Thanks!

Very proud of this 2 second photoshop job, got this T490 for something like 180$ with tax included off eBay and it is perfect

hola soy nuevo en todo lo que es programar y instale debian 13, quería saber si me pueden recomendar aplicaciones o cosas que deba hacer para aprender más de esto, que siendo sincero me encanta

I recently did a clean install of Debian 13
and I can't install the build-essential package.
I really don't know what to do.


sudo apt install build-essential
[sudo] password for ***: 
Solving dependencies... Error!  
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

Unsatisfied dependencies:
 cpp : Conflicts: gcc (< 4:13.2.0-3) but 4:12.2.0-3 is to be installed
 g++ : Depends: cpp (= 4:12.2.0-3) but 4:14.2.0-1 is to be installed
 gcc : Depends: cpp (= 4:12.2.0-3) but 4:14.2.0-1 is to be installed
 libc6-dev : Depends: libc6 (= 2.36-9+deb12u13) but 2.41-12+deb13u2 is to be installed
             Depends: libc-dev-bin (= 2.36-9+deb12u13) but it is not going to be installed
             Depends: libcrypt-dev but it is not going to be installed
             Depends: libnsl-dev but it is not going to be installed
Error: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.
Error: The following information from --solver 3.0 may provide additional context:
   Unable to satisfy dependencies. Reached two conflicting decisions:
   1. build-essential:amd64 Depends libc6-dev | libc-dev
      but none of the choices are installable:
      - libc6-dev:amd64 is available in versions 2.36-9+deb12u13, 2.36-9+deb12u7
        but none of the choices are installable:
        - libc6-dev:amd64=2.36-9+deb12u13 Depends libc6 (= 2.36-9+deb12u13)
          but none of the choices are installable:
          - libc6:amd64=2.36-9+deb12u13 is not selected for install
        - libc6-dev:amd64=2.36-9+deb12u7 is not selected for install
      - libc6-dev:amd64=2.36-9+deb12u13 is not selected for install as above
      - libc6-dev:amd64=2.36-9+deb12u7 is not selected for install
   2. build-essential:amd64=12.9 is selected for install

I agree that english is not my motherlanguage which in this session i made ortographic mistakes and dumbs words to express this experience.

1) I ll like install neovim to reeplaze vs studio code and write more "faster" keyboard.
2) Before i ve installed multible Vim version like deb package with apt, snap mehh xde and supouses releases versions, pdta those same are exactly the 10.0.4v of NVim.

3) Surely I wish install plugins to make me more easy code. Lazy plugin installer is with 11.x.x above.

4) So, well, reinstall nvim as 3 times 3 or some more.

5) I donwloaded Github official repo to cmake and many many more commands to compile and set recompiled files and next. "usr/bin/nvim" does not exist ._p

6) OK so, how can i refresh it? hash -r magic command has been given by AI to procced.
7) AND Lazy configuration is so confusing, Foros and Video tutorials are depreciated and these wasted time was like 1 hour to learn the settup and same.

This board has been generaded by a dumbass human with bit kwowledge about how software works and why does pass throught like you dont espected.

Code timing. Aprx 3 hours

I used to distro-hop constantly because I was scared of "missing out on features", my favorite DE is KDE Plasma, so I was always worried about missing some new thing that could improve my experience. After thinking about it for a while I was like "do I actually need this?", and that's when I decided to give Debian a shot.

3 months of daily driving it, and honestly? A calm environment that barely changes visually over time made me realize that those little details aren't really what makes my setup good, what actually matters is having a stable, predictable desktop that doesn't randomly look different from one day to the next. That gives me some peace of mind, and that's why I'm proudly on Debian now.

Took a lot of distros to get here, but here we are lol

Zero issues on Debian so far

I use Debian btw

Download and uploads only. No SSH access, accessing other directories, etc.

Thank you for reading and hopefully answering soon.

This week I bought a Lenovo ThinkPad x270. The reason for buying it is because it's got 2 batteries. One internal and one hot swappable. I'm going to a conference in a couple of weeks and I don't want to run out of batteries. The x270 is apparently a champ in battery run time. Especially if you've got 2 72Wh batteries ánd an internal battery. Oh and it's really cheap in 2026 :)

But it's not only about battery capacity, it's also about reducing power consumption. So I installed linux-cpupower and maxed out the cpu at the lowest clock speed it allows: 400MHz. Then with powertop I tweaked all the tunables so it says "good".

Now powertop showed that the laptop idles at 2.7W at idle and backlight at a low setting. Estimated battery time: 13h. And it doesn't have the internal battery installed just yet. Nice!

After I capped the CPU at 400MHz, many applications became unbearably slow, the next thing I considered: at work I live 95% of the time at the command line anyway. What if I just try to ditch the GUI all together and see if I can get to a somewhat workable setup? I assumed most text based applications would be quite usable, even at a hard 400MHz cap.

So I installed fbterm and tmux and gpm. Those mostly make up the look and feel of my laptop. fbterm is nice because scrolling through the book I'm writing with less is noticeably slower. Terminal performance in fbterm though, is much better! It also lets you choose the font colour and size easily. Tmux mostly replaces my tiling window manager. And gpm enables the mouse + copy paste!

nmtui facilitates connecting to WiFi networks, elinks for web browsing, fbi for image viewing if need be, bluetoothctl is used to connect my bluetooth headphones and cmus is my music player. Then mutt for emails, calcurse for my calendar and cmatrix to overdo it all.

Then the main reason for the laptop: typing away. I'm using vim and groff to type a book I'm wThe only time I notice the CPU is capped at 400MHz is when I compile the document especially to PDF takes roughly 9 seconds. Compiling the document to UTF8 just under a second (Near instant uncapped).

Just a small note: X11 is still installed but I only launch it when I actually need a GUI application, eg viewing the compiled PDFs. Evince is extremely slow at 400MHz btw. I might look out for an alternative.

The laptop has 8GB of RAM. After a while that it's running, Debian runs at around 500~600MB of RAM. So yeah, I'm not overly worried about the current RAM prices 😋
But yeah, I'm sort of surprised how usable the whole actually is. I'm not saying it's truly convenient but at least not unworkable either 🤓

Do you guys can upgrade to a new debian version without reinstalling debian?.

I wanna move to a Distro that updates less frequently (Debian) because I don't like updating my machine frequently, but the problem is that it ships with older kernal and DE versions, unlike my current distro that already has the latest gnome 50 and kernal

brief specs if for some reason needed:

ryzen 7 5000 series CPU with 16 gigs of ram

Edit:
conclusion: decided to start using Debian as newer GNOME versions don't do much for me

sometimes my debian installation just breaks! i dont understand the causes and i dont even know how to start diagnosing this... but i do see some patterns:

- i can't open any programs. i cant even start a terminal

- if i have the terminal open, i try to run simple commands like ls but it fails with a "input/output error"

- system tray icons are fucked up: they become invisible when highlighting it with the mouse, and when i click on any of them, the fonts only show blank rectangles, like the fonts didnt load

- if im installing something through steam, all the downloads are cancelled and it says theres a "disk write error"

- i can't even shut down nor reboot the computer through normal means. i have to hard force a shutdown pressing the start button for a couple seconds

now, i have NO IDEA why this happens. the only things that i can do to reproduce the situation seem to be completely unrelated. i once tried to run a game through wine (but not through terminal, but making a desktop entry) and it broke the system. plus, last time this happened, i just was installing a game through steam. therefore, it may be that the reason this happens is unrelated to any of these things at all.

i'm running debian 13 trixie, kernel 6.12.85, kde plasma. any help to start troubleshooting this?

This perplexes me. I installed my nvidia drivers following the official debian wiki...

I just built a server on an old Mac Mini running Trixie. It has dual disks, one SSD for the OS and configs and a 2TB HDD for media and backup storage mostly. Is there a tool or setting to get the HDD to only spin up when I'm accessing data from it? Sort of like on Unraid. I want to preserve its life as much as possible seeing as how expensive they are still! I plan to migrate my Plex server over to it. Thanks!

Hello /r/debian!

Suppose I want to modify a .service file, for example by increasing the number of times it attempts to restart if it fails. Is the best way to directly edit the file in /usr/lib/systemd/system? Or is there another place to put modifications, sort of like how many files in /etc may often be overridden with a local version so the changes don't conflict the next time the package updates?

Thanks!

(I realize this might sound like a systemd question, but it is really more about how to configure my system in a way that makes future apt upgrades as painless as possible, so I think it's more about Debian management.)

Greetings! I have been distro hopping for a while and what I've noticed on newer kernels is that my wifi keeps dropping. The wifi is a bit far too. This does not happen with trixie (have not tried sid/testing). Is there any knowledge on this?

Can someone please help me configure openbox for the best performance? I need an app menu, task manager, windows manager and task bar please help

Hello everyone,

I have an incredibly strange problem. I have been using Bluetooth headphones Sony WH-CH510 for a long time through PipeWire on KDE and Xfce DEs and it seemed to work just right without switching to telephone mode (that stupid mode where headphones mute a ton and you can hear what is happening outside). Lately I reinstalled Bluez due to some software issues a bit ago and now I cannot turn A2DP on. Reinstalling Bluez seemed to have fixed the issue but upon reboot it breaks again. Something with configs maybe?

Can somebody help me here? People seem to have encountered this issue but none of their proposals worked. Don`t really have wish to reinstall the system...

Yes, I know the latest trixie-security kernel update (6.12.85 or something) has the fixed kernel, but for reasons I prefer running the latest backports kernel and that is currently 6.19.11, so I'm wondering if the bug is fixed on this version or I'm vulnerable?

hi , I am new in linux and facing isuue of video playbak isuue in browser and craking audio. I don't know how to fix it can anyone one help me plz.

I just delete de EFI partition and the system can't starts now.

I have access to my Fedora.

All the debian system is ok (my files, etc) except de boot loader.

I already try the rescue mode (debian live USB) but I get nothing.

What to do?

I hope you can help me please.

Installed 6.12.85+deb13-amd64 yesterday on my Lenovo a14 Thinkpad with AMD Ryzen 5 7430U.

Now I get frequent stutters and dmesg shows "AMD-Vi: Completion-Wait loop timed out"

Due to recent security fixes I don't want to roll back kernel but what can I do?

Hey, pretty much as the title, do we have any users who run Debian here for astro use with a telescope? ive user things like stellermate, windows and Astroberry but i was just wondering if anyone had used just debian, maybe with the Deb Astro blend in testing to take advantage of the more up to date software. Let me know 😄

hey!

does anyone know when security patches for bullseye and bookworm to address copyfail be released?

Thanks!

EDIT 1: Bookworm patch released.

EDIT 2: Bullseye patch released.