Debian Bullseye & GNOME 42: A Better Jammy Jellyfish?

Want a stable Debian 11 system with the latest desktops and kernels, but free of snaps and configuration decisions made by others? Want automatic snapshotting and just the updates you need and nothing more while keeping resource usage as light as possible? This video shows how!

Download the base live ISO here:

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[bharm]

Wow! That was immensely helpful. I have read and re-read posts on how to do this and had some of it figured out. However, following your method closely, I finally got it nailed. Thank you for your calm and reasoned manner of showing this path. It was finally easy to see the parts I had missed. I learned a LOT along the way. Much appreciated!

[johanb.]

I have a refurbished Dell 5050 Optiplex mini and I installed Debian XFCE on it. I don't need the newer kernel. Works perfectly on the little Dell. Installed very quick with the Calamares installer. It's quick, very stable and easy to use.

[DanielTolentino]

Wow, that was smooth. Snapper is pretty cool too!

[atefwadia]

Really I found this very special channel present unique tutorial of Linux learnnig by doing with helpful and support by the brave Stephan

[NOPerative]

Wow.
Fantastic video; checks all the boxes.

[TankDude]

Brilliant work! Will also give it a shot!

[MartinSchweigert]

Thank you for that video - very helpful!

[scc-sou-cristao-comunista]

*A Better Jammy Jellyfish?* - For me, no doubt!

[MrWarneet]

There's something comfortable about a Debian base.

[NoMastersNoMistress]

A similar line of thought basically lead me to MX Linux 21 AHS with the Liquorix kernel and now I'm having the best XFCE experience I've ever had. I don't like Plasma or Snaps so I bailed out of Ubuntu Studio, which was my daily driver for years. I suppose when Debian 12 rolls out I'll probably switch to that if they make Pipewire easier to install or offer it by default.

[pentavit]

Your reviews and tutorials are the best! Could you do the same for KDE?

[jvillasante]

This is pretty good! Please, do a Debian + Nix now. It would be nice to have an stable core like Debian with Nix for userland.

[ramirez]

I want to thank you for the work you do! I have learned a lot from you. What is the distro that you use as a daily driver?

[jesse]

Hi Stephen, when I try doing this to upgrade GNOME, I get this error regarding unmet dependencies:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
tracker-miner-fs : Breaks: rygel (< 0.40.1-3~) but 0.40.0-1 is to be installed

Any ideas?

[CrustyAbsconder]

Do you think in 2023, Debian Stable will have made all this a little more newbie-friendly ??

[curiexr]

My linux adventures yesterday - installed debian 11 but had issues with dash-to-dock, decided to format disk and install ubuntu 22.04 instead. Realized installing ubuntu was a mistake, reformatted the disk and installed debian 11 again. Not too bad after all 😂Going to experiment with dash-to-dock-for-cosmic soon.

[act..]

I have been playing around with openSUSE since 9.0 and Arch back in its humble beginnings. I have always been torn between the two, as they are both great distros. I have never run Debian, but I have Rufus putting the live DVD on a thumbdrive right now and I want to give it a shot.

[alexandersemenov]

Thank you for the lesson! I am trying to update Gnome 3.38 on your tutorial step by step. As of today, the repository only offers Gnome 43.2. It is important for me to keep Debian 11 and install Gnome >40. Installing Gnome 43.2 fails with "Oh!" screen. I assume Gnome 43 is for Debian 12 only. Unfortunately, I could not find instructions on how to install Gnome 40-42 on Debian 11. I would be grateful for your advice.

[saycheeseordie]

Fantastic video! I've finally got zswap and snapper running on my machine since I was too lazy to set both of them up on my own.

Gnome 42 didn't go so well though.
Something that you didn't mention - this will likely break your wayland session. I wasn't able to get Gnome 42 on Bullseye run with Wayland. It seems like bug\weird feature since I've noticed after you've installed G42 you've also switched to X11 session, and as of writing, that's still the case. I'm on Renoir (5 5600G) using amdgpu. Any ideas what could cause that behaviour? There are random posts online about that, but they're mostly related to:
1. Nvidia, which is horrible to begin with
2. Old hardware that picked up wrong driver

[methanoid]

Really like your guides. This seems to deliver a similar result to Spiral Linux (which is great BTW). Wouldn't mind seeing a Ubuntu/Kubuntu + BTRFS + Snapshots ;-) |(argh watched so many of your vids thought I was on Debian+BTRFS video!)