Debian (or ubuntu) on a micro sd card (pinebook pro)

[moonwalkers]

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.

Believe it or not, Arch Linux wiki is a fantastic resource for Debian :-D The only thing you won't find there - is info about some Debian-specific bits.

Another huge source of learning for me was my experiment (which I started back in early 2009 after I finished distro-hopping and decided on Debian) with installing Debian 0.93r6 on my old ThinkPad 300 and then upgrading that one system through every version all the way to the latest. I've been upgrading it from version to version, migrating it from one drive to another bigger one, swapping the drives from older to newer laptops, migrating to LVM, enabling full-disk encryption, re-generating keys, upgrading encryption algorithms, filesystems... Eventually cross-graded it from 32-bit to 64-bit, and I'm still running that very same installation back from 2009 on my primary laptop, currently ThinkPad P53.

As to WM/DE recommendation - I'd catch try them all, that's the best way to find out which one you like most. But for some of them - give them more than few minutes/hours, give them at least few days or even weeks.

As to my favorite - admittedly, by the time I switched full-time to Linux in 2008/2009 I've already become a Windows power user, so maybe that's at least one of the reasons, but I pretty quickly settled on KDE. Other reasons - I've always been a big fan of orthodox (commonly incorrectly called "dual panel") file managers, since I started computing in mid/late 90s, and IMHO only Krusader comes anywhere close to the power and versatility of Total Commander on Windows. I also liked Konsole and was rather annoyed by most other terminals. I liked Gwenview and Amarok, KATE/Kwrite, etc. In other words, most of applications I came to like the most are either KDE or Qt apps, so KDE became a natural choice. Another reason is how configurable KDE is, and the integration among the pieces like the KATE text editing component is used throughout, and Konsole terminal is embedded in Dolphin file manager, Krusader, Yakuake, and some other apps. I also like the notification system in KDE Plasma and prefer it to how notifications are done in other DEs. Kwin window manager supports some basic tiling out of the box, and has support for plugins that can enhance it. All those plugin can be downloaded and installed automatically. The only downside - despite losing quite a bit of weight in the recent years, compared to most other DEs it is still a bit on the heavy side, though it is also _much_ lighter than Windows - bare bones 64-bit Windows desktop in my tests was idling at over 1GiB RAM, my Debian with KDE Plasma idles at less than 0.5GiB RAM on the same hardware.

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Also, I want to learn if you use Debian official installer or Daniel Thompson's scripts? The pinebook pro wiki is recommending Daniel Thompson's installer; so, I have been choosing it over Debian official installer, which seems to have problems.

I've installed Debian on my PBP back in January, way before official Debian installer was available, and I don't see any reason to re-install, so I'm not aware whether the official installer is already a viable alternative to debootstrap-based approach.