08-25-2020, 09:43 AM
(08-24-2020, 12:02 AM)moonwalkers Wrote:(08-23-2020, 07:46 PM)pine76 Wrote: I prefer to choose an OS that stay out of my way during my workfow; an OS which gives me minimal effort for maintenance so I can concentrate on my own work. I do research and I am self-learning mathematics, my experience with linux is mostly relevant to that area plus some light to medium linux administration. Some of the software that I use, e.g. emacs, latex, have steep learning curves. So, I prefer to learn them instead of learning linux to be a power user.
Well, TBH one of the reasons I ended up sticking with Debian is because IMHO it's the ultimate "dial-a-nerd", if you will, distro. You can be as hands-on or hands-off with it as you want. My home server is mostly hands-off - it automatically upgrades and reboots if necessary, sending me daily reports whether it didn't find any updates or it found and installed them, though it still requires my intervention for dist-upgrades as well as if new upstream configs conflict with my modifications. My steambox is similar, except it tracks testing instead of stable. But my two laptops are much more hands-on, both because of more "exotic" hardware, because they are tracking unstable and unstable with experimental correspondingly, and because I actually spend a large amount of time with them anyway, using them for all kinds of work and hobby tasks.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is you don't necessarily have to commit to becoming a Linux power user to enjoy Debian, but be mentally prepared that at some point you may end up having to do at least some learning if you venture away from stable or adopt a more hands-on approach - in testing/unstable (and digging in OS guts) here there be dragons.
Yes, I am also interested in settling down with Debian after trying distros for a long time; none of the distros I tried seems as neat and respectful as Debian up to now.
I have two cheap micro sd cards that I can use to experiment with Debian sid + latest kernel. I am also considering to move away from Gnome, which has been my favorite desktop, to a lightweight wm. Sway seems to be a good one, I am also considering Enlightenment as it also seems to use Wayland instead of X11. Do you have any recommendation?
I guess I have quite a bit to learn (hands on and off). Debian has some reference guide, unfortunately a bit dated, even for the stable. Still, I could use it as a main resource, I believe it is called Debian reference book or similar.