It has been about 2 months since the support cycle for Linux Mint 13 LTS "Maya" ended. Since then, I haven't been able to update Mozilla Firefox or Adobe Flash, and concurrently, I haven't been able to use the latest versions of Google Hangouts or Skype, the former of which I already cannot use to the fullest extent, and the latter of which I am still somehow able to use but am counting the days when that will end too. Given that, it is urgent that I upgrade the Linux distribution that I use soon, so today, I am trying Debian.
Debian is a rather old distribution, being among the first to use the Linux kernel. It is known for its very conservative release policy for distribution and package versions, as well as its strict policies regarding free versus proprietary software; as such, it is known to be a stable base (and has been the original base for Ubuntu and its derivatives) for desktop and server environments, though while it is not supposed to be a piece of cake to configure and use, it does come with decently-configured generic DEs and other software to start. I figure that I have accumulated a bit of experience with testing and configuring Linux distributions, so that I may be able to install and configure things to my liking even if they aren't present by default.
I tested the 64-bit edition on a live USB made from a live ISO file using the command "cp", which Debian recommends. Additionally, it is worth noting that this is the first review that I'm doing on a new SanDisk Cruzer 8 GB flash drive (as my previous SanDisk Cruzer Micro 8 GB flash drive, which I got 8 years ago, seems to have stopped working reliably, which is why I haven't used it for reviews in the last few months, and the flash drive that I had been using in the meantime, a generic 4 GB unit which I got for free from a career fair several years ago, stopped working after a "dd" command failed). Follow the jump to see what it's like. (Also, I apologize that there are no pictures; I stupidly forgot to upload them, and by the time I exited the live session and restarted my computer, it was too late.)
After getting past the boot menu, I was greeted by a scrolling wall of text. That took a short time to then yield the desktop. The desktop is MATE in its default configuration, highly reminiscent of GNOME 2; the icons, window decorations, and GTK+ theme are all stock MATE, as is the two-panel setup. This befits Debian, which values stability and doesn't go for flashiness, and this is a tried-and-true layout, so of course it's easy to use.
Mozilla Firefox is the default browser; it is worth noting that the Extended Support Release (ESR) is present (at version 45), and I think ESR updates come for every 7 normal release updates. As this is Debian, no proprietary plugins or codecs are present. However, it is easy enough to include the repositories that allow installing such packages, and doing that installation is fairly easy. That said, the big dealbreaker for me is that there is no official Debian repository-maintained version of Adobe Flash; it used to be present with previous versions of Debian, but now, it is required to enable the unstable "sid" repositories. This tells me that the Debian maintainers no longer believe that Adobe Flash is stable enough to include in the main repositories, which is a fair point considering how many vulnerabilities it has, how fragile it seems to be, and how so many sites are moving away from it, but unfortunately, there are still many sites I need to use on a regular basis that require that plugin, and if I'm going to be using a version of Debian reputed for its stability, then I simply don't feel comfortable taking the leap to enable the unstable repositories, especially with all of the warnings surrounding them.
LibreOffice is present as the default productivity suite. The rest of the application collection present is fairly sparse, and some of the choices seem a bit weird. For example, multiple terminal applications are present, including multilingual and Thai-language terminals, along with a Khmer character converter, yet certain basic GUI applications, like GDebi for manual DEB package installation, are not, and neither are music or video player applications. It's also odd that under the "System" menu, the "Administration" submenu has the Synaptic Package Manager as its only entry.
Speaking of that, I was able to use it without any issues to install Mupen64Plus, Redshift, Cheese Webcam Booth (for testing my webcam), and VLC. All of those worked well, and VLC was even able to play MP3 and MP4 files from my computer's hard drive which would normally be locked due to the restricted permissions of the live USB system. I had to install Skype from its own website, but that worked fine; I was able to confirm that my audio and microphone worked fine, though as I have mentioned before, the new version of Skype does not have a way to verify that it recognizes the webcam correctly. As Google Talk has been deprecated in favor of Google Hangouts, which is no longer an installable plugin (and does not play nicely with Mozilla Firefox with respect to audio & video calls for the time being), that bit of testing is now a moot point.
There were a couple of other things that I tested as I would like to seriously consider this for installation. I tried connecting to my research group's server remotely through a terminal as well as through the Caja file manager; both worked fine for running commands, using GUI programs, and editing files. Additionally, I tried connecting my phone to the computer to read files; that worked, but was extremely slow to read folders and open or copy files to a frustrating degree.
Slowness was the name of the game for my experience with Debian. Although it only used 413 MB of RAM at idle according to the command "free -m", the MATE System Monitor showed a much higher RAM figure, and that seemed to jibe more with what I felt. In particular, clicking on menu items, opening dialog boxes, scrolling, and doing things of that nature all had a noticeable (though still relatively short) latency period, along with the aforementioned slowness in reading the contents of my phone. It may be possible that this is due to my flash drive or the way I created the live USB system, but as will become clear in an upcoming review, while this accounts for a small amount of latency (in clicking, moving windows, or reading data from my phone), most of this I can only blame on Debian.
Additionally, there were a few other nits I had to pick regarding usability. I found the default monospace font choice and size to be too small for my tastes, in both the Pluma text editor and in the MATE Terminal application, and I can imagine that others may have a much more difficult time with this (though none of the other application fonts were too small). Plus, when I used my laptop's keyboard shortcuts to change the volume or screen brightness, the resulting indicator in the middle of the screen made it very difficult to actually see what the volume or brightness levels were. It turns out (as will become clear in an upcoming review) that the former issue is not unique to Debian, but the latter issue appears to be so.
That's where my time with Debian 9 "Stretch" MATE ended. It clearly isn't meant for newbies, while those who specifically want Debian for its stability, free software, or suitability as a server OS will continue to use it for those purposes anyway, though my intention in reviewing this distribution doesn't cover those use-cases. I just want to see how feasible it would be for me to install and regularly use Debian without having to do too much low-level configuration or debugging, but the lack of a stable version of Adobe Flash, in conjunction with the slowness and usability issues, means that this probably isn't the right distribution for me.
You can get it here.
EDIT: A lot of people have raised issues with my observations of slowness, specifically with regard to my use of a live USB to test this. Additionally, I realize that as this is a review of a more powerful and less newbie-friendly distribution like Debian, many people may have assumed that this would be a review from the perspective of a power user and may have been disappointed to see this. I attempted to clarify these points in this review itself as well as in my replies to comments, but for general interest, I will emphasize the following points.
1. For those new to my blog, the set of things I have tried here is representative of other reviews that I have done. I am not a power user, merely a Linux enthusiast. As such, I review for the benefit of newbies, which means that I more or less review from the perspective of a newbie as well, and if I don't find something to work quite right, while I may spend a little time finding a solution, I will generally not move heaven and earth to make it work myself, and simply report what I see. This is something I point out in the concluding paragraph too, and I want to make clear that none of this is meant to disrespect Debian, its developers, or its users; I am merely pointing out that I have come into this review with a certain set of expectations based on similar reviews that I have done over the years, and have found that it wouldn't be right for me to use regularly.
2. With regard to the specific issue of slowness, many commenters have taken issue with my use of a live USB. I invite all readers to peruse past reviews on my blog: what you will find for the most part is that in consistently doing reviews through live USB systems, I generally have not had performance issues with such systems, and in the few cases (discussed in long-term reviews) that I've installed another distribution to a hard drive and used it for at least a week of regular work, I have found the live and installed system speeds to be comparable. This is why I find the slowness of the Debian live USB system to be notable, especially when other distributions like Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Manjaro, Chakra, and many others don't have such issues. Some commenters have also said that the Debian Live project in particular is not meant to be representative of the performance of an installed system; this is a fair point, but then I would expect to see a disclaimer of some sort posted on its website to that effect, given that my expectations have been primed and met fairly consistently across the aforementioned range of distributions with respect to the performance of a live USB system (and its comparison to an installed system).
Debian is a rather old distribution, being among the first to use the Linux kernel. It is known for its very conservative release policy for distribution and package versions, as well as its strict policies regarding free versus proprietary software; as such, it is known to be a stable base (and has been the original base for Ubuntu and its derivatives) for desktop and server environments, though while it is not supposed to be a piece of cake to configure and use, it does come with decently-configured generic DEs and other software to start. I figure that I have accumulated a bit of experience with testing and configuring Linux distributions, so that I may be able to install and configure things to my liking even if they aren't present by default.
I tested the 64-bit edition on a live USB made from a live ISO file using the command "cp", which Debian recommends. Additionally, it is worth noting that this is the first review that I'm doing on a new SanDisk Cruzer 8 GB flash drive (as my previous SanDisk Cruzer Micro 8 GB flash drive, which I got 8 years ago, seems to have stopped working reliably, which is why I haven't used it for reviews in the last few months, and the flash drive that I had been using in the meantime, a generic 4 GB unit which I got for free from a career fair several years ago, stopped working after a "dd" command failed). Follow the jump to see what it's like. (Also, I apologize that there are no pictures; I stupidly forgot to upload them, and by the time I exited the live session and restarted my computer, it was too late.)
After getting past the boot menu, I was greeted by a scrolling wall of text. That took a short time to then yield the desktop. The desktop is MATE in its default configuration, highly reminiscent of GNOME 2; the icons, window decorations, and GTK+ theme are all stock MATE, as is the two-panel setup. This befits Debian, which values stability and doesn't go for flashiness, and this is a tried-and-true layout, so of course it's easy to use.
Mozilla Firefox is the default browser; it is worth noting that the Extended Support Release (ESR) is present (at version 45), and I think ESR updates come for every 7 normal release updates. As this is Debian, no proprietary plugins or codecs are present. However, it is easy enough to include the repositories that allow installing such packages, and doing that installation is fairly easy. That said, the big dealbreaker for me is that there is no official Debian repository-maintained version of Adobe Flash; it used to be present with previous versions of Debian, but now, it is required to enable the unstable "sid" repositories. This tells me that the Debian maintainers no longer believe that Adobe Flash is stable enough to include in the main repositories, which is a fair point considering how many vulnerabilities it has, how fragile it seems to be, and how so many sites are moving away from it, but unfortunately, there are still many sites I need to use on a regular basis that require that plugin, and if I'm going to be using a version of Debian reputed for its stability, then I simply don't feel comfortable taking the leap to enable the unstable repositories, especially with all of the warnings surrounding them.
LibreOffice is present as the default productivity suite. The rest of the application collection present is fairly sparse, and some of the choices seem a bit weird. For example, multiple terminal applications are present, including multilingual and Thai-language terminals, along with a Khmer character converter, yet certain basic GUI applications, like GDebi for manual DEB package installation, are not, and neither are music or video player applications. It's also odd that under the "System" menu, the "Administration" submenu has the Synaptic Package Manager as its only entry.
Speaking of that, I was able to use it without any issues to install Mupen64Plus, Redshift, Cheese Webcam Booth (for testing my webcam), and VLC. All of those worked well, and VLC was even able to play MP3 and MP4 files from my computer's hard drive which would normally be locked due to the restricted permissions of the live USB system. I had to install Skype from its own website, but that worked fine; I was able to confirm that my audio and microphone worked fine, though as I have mentioned before, the new version of Skype does not have a way to verify that it recognizes the webcam correctly. As Google Talk has been deprecated in favor of Google Hangouts, which is no longer an installable plugin (and does not play nicely with Mozilla Firefox with respect to audio & video calls for the time being), that bit of testing is now a moot point.
There were a couple of other things that I tested as I would like to seriously consider this for installation. I tried connecting to my research group's server remotely through a terminal as well as through the Caja file manager; both worked fine for running commands, using GUI programs, and editing files. Additionally, I tried connecting my phone to the computer to read files; that worked, but was extremely slow to read folders and open or copy files to a frustrating degree.
Slowness was the name of the game for my experience with Debian. Although it only used 413 MB of RAM at idle according to the command "free -m", the MATE System Monitor showed a much higher RAM figure, and that seemed to jibe more with what I felt. In particular, clicking on menu items, opening dialog boxes, scrolling, and doing things of that nature all had a noticeable (though still relatively short) latency period, along with the aforementioned slowness in reading the contents of my phone. It may be possible that this is due to my flash drive or the way I created the live USB system, but as will become clear in an upcoming review, while this accounts for a small amount of latency (in clicking, moving windows, or reading data from my phone), most of this I can only blame on Debian.
Additionally, there were a few other nits I had to pick regarding usability. I found the default monospace font choice and size to be too small for my tastes, in both the Pluma text editor and in the MATE Terminal application, and I can imagine that others may have a much more difficult time with this (though none of the other application fonts were too small). Plus, when I used my laptop's keyboard shortcuts to change the volume or screen brightness, the resulting indicator in the middle of the screen made it very difficult to actually see what the volume or brightness levels were. It turns out (as will become clear in an upcoming review) that the former issue is not unique to Debian, but the latter issue appears to be so.
That's where my time with Debian 9 "Stretch" MATE ended. It clearly isn't meant for newbies, while those who specifically want Debian for its stability, free software, or suitability as a server OS will continue to use it for those purposes anyway, though my intention in reviewing this distribution doesn't cover those use-cases. I just want to see how feasible it would be for me to install and regularly use Debian without having to do too much low-level configuration or debugging, but the lack of a stable version of Adobe Flash, in conjunction with the slowness and usability issues, means that this probably isn't the right distribution for me.
You can get it here.
EDIT: A lot of people have raised issues with my observations of slowness, specifically with regard to my use of a live USB to test this. Additionally, I realize that as this is a review of a more powerful and less newbie-friendly distribution like Debian, many people may have assumed that this would be a review from the perspective of a power user and may have been disappointed to see this. I attempted to clarify these points in this review itself as well as in my replies to comments, but for general interest, I will emphasize the following points.
1. For those new to my blog, the set of things I have tried here is representative of other reviews that I have done. I am not a power user, merely a Linux enthusiast. As such, I review for the benefit of newbies, which means that I more or less review from the perspective of a newbie as well, and if I don't find something to work quite right, while I may spend a little time finding a solution, I will generally not move heaven and earth to make it work myself, and simply report what I see. This is something I point out in the concluding paragraph too, and I want to make clear that none of this is meant to disrespect Debian, its developers, or its users; I am merely pointing out that I have come into this review with a certain set of expectations based on similar reviews that I have done over the years, and have found that it wouldn't be right for me to use regularly.
2. With regard to the specific issue of slowness, many commenters have taken issue with my use of a live USB. I invite all readers to peruse past reviews on my blog: what you will find for the most part is that in consistently doing reviews through live USB systems, I generally have not had performance issues with such systems, and in the few cases (discussed in long-term reviews) that I've installed another distribution to a hard drive and used it for at least a week of regular work, I have found the live and installed system speeds to be comparable. This is why I find the slowness of the Debian live USB system to be notable, especially when other distributions like Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Manjaro, Chakra, and many others don't have such issues. Some commenters have also said that the Debian Live project in particular is not meant to be representative of the performance of an installed system; this is a fair point, but then I would expect to see a disclaimer of some sort posted on its website to that effect, given that my expectations have been primed and met fairly consistently across the aforementioned range of distributions with respect to the performance of a live USB system (and its comparison to an installed system).
