Moving to Debian.

After years of being an Apple fan boy, I spent one year working on a huge ugly laptop powered by Ubuntu. This wasn't a big struggle for me because I used to be a Linux user long time ago before I even met Mac OS in my life. And even when I used Mac OS I used it mainly as a terminal than anything else. More of it, when you open Apple's website on Mac OS and page and see what they are advertising the operating system with, I haven't used any of it.

So the switch from Apple to Ubuntu wasn't a big deal for me.

1 year working on Ubuntu.

It is not a bad distro for a newbie. This is what they are targeting for. It is very easy way to move to linux if you don't have any experience with it. But for me ... working on a proprietary software that might change with every next version ... This is not a good thing to be honest. So I preferred something with more freedom in it. So after a research of most used distros out there I decided to stop on Debian.

For many years Debian was an association with servers and admins for me. But after you give it a try it happens to be very good distribution with a strong goal in mind - Freedom and Stability (unless you want to test and contribute with experiments).

The installation process.

The installation is very easy. The online documentation is well written and there is a lot of information.

Freedom comes with a cost. Drivers and hardware.

Usually Ubuntu is picked as a choice because everything works after the installation. This is not 100% of the case with Debian.

There might a bit of struggle with drivers if your hardware is proprietary and you are not used to manage it but it is easilly fixable. Since Debian focuses on Freedom by default the distro is installed with free software only. You can change this and install proprietary software and drivers.

After the installation my Wifi card didn't work but with a few commands (connected via Ethernet cable) it was fixed.

Installing Intel's Wifi Adapter Driver on Debian. For Broadcom the driver will be different. But you can follow the same steps and search for Broadcom driver.

1. Find which Wifi adapter you are using:
   

   $ lspci

   Here is my Wifi adapter:
   

   00:14.3 Network controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP CNVi [Wireless-AC] (rev 30)

   We will need the code at the beginning of the line for the next command
   
2. Find which driver it is using:
   

   $ lspci -vvs 00:14.3

   Here is the driver:
   

   Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi

   Kernel modules: iwlwifi

3. Check if the driver is installed:
   

   $ lsmod | grep iwl

4. Find the driver information on Debian page:
   https://wiki.debian.org/iwlwifi
   
   
5. Update your APT sources with non-free software:
   sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
   And add "non-free" to every source - Actually adding it only to the first one is enough.
   
6. Install the driver:
   

   $ sudo apt-get update
   $ sudo apt-get install firmware-iwlwifi
   

7. Load the driver:
   

   $ sudo modprobe -r iwlwifi; sudo modprobe iwlwifi

   "modprobe -r" will remove the driver
   "modprove" without "-r" will load it again.
   If the driver is used by another driver you might get error "Fatal: Driver is in use" or something like this. Then you have to see which driver is using it and unload it too. In my case it was used by "iwlmvm" so I did:
   

   $ sudo modprobe -r iwlmvm iwlwifi

I am using it for almost half a year and there was nothing I have missed in it.

For coding:

• Sublime Text
• VSCode - for bloody TypeScript projects.

Terminal:

• tmux - after using Iterm2 on Mac OS for years I can say tmux is amazing. There is a short learning curve and a small inconvenient that every command starts with a combination of keys (Ctrl + B, then another key for the command) but it is easy to get used to it and stay as productive as you've been on Mac OS.

For drawing:

• Krita - amazing free alternative to Photoshop for drawing. The Wacom tablet works out of the box and Krita is installed via APT with one command.

Debian is not only for servers and admins as I used to think. It is not even for hardcore linux users only. It is for everyone.

Debian is easy especially for Ubuntu users because Ubuntu is Debian based distro. Most of the commands and the way you install packages is the same.