Finally had a few moments to put Debian on my Eee PC 701 like I’ve been wanting for a while. So far, I really like it…although I don’t think it’s for the n00bs.
The first thing that I noticed was that it is fast. Really fast. Boot takes about 20 seconds, and Gnome is snappier than I’ve ever experienced on this machine under Ubuntu. Way snappier. Snappy enough that so far…I haven’t been annoyed at all. The user experience of vanilla GNOME is great, as I would expect, and not drastically different from Ubuntu’s customizations.
A few of the non-n00b things I noticed:
- Network Manager not installed by default
- Removable in drives in /media are not named by disk label at the file system level (e.g., at the command line they appear as usb1, usb2 etc. In Nautilus they are seen with the disklabel…KINGSTON, MEMOREX MINI, etc)
- No offers by the OS to go fetch codecs when you don’t have them (mp3 support is not automatic)
- Synaptic not installed by default
As an experienced Linux user, here some things I really liked:
- Minimal install, even when selecting GNOME — no Rhythmbox, OpenOffice, or games. Just the essentials.
- Everything is clean under the hood—it’s pretty easy to see what’s going on. Less seems “hidden” from the user.
- You don’t feel like you’re breaking stuff if you choose to not install or uninstall GNOME.
- Multiple versions to choose from depending on your needs: Stable, Testing, Unstable
- Debian testing is a rolling-release distribution—constant updates and never a need to do an official “upgrade.”
No doubt, Ubuntu has its advantages in terms of pure ease of use…but for the experienced Linux power user, there’s a lot to like about Debian.
