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Comment by donkeybeer | Hacker News Reader

I am planning the same and for exactly the same reasons, viz snap. Its encouraging to hear you have had success with it.

edit: Is there anyone who can share their experiences switching from Ubuntu to Debian on the desktop?

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My Ubuntu desktop was very customized to make it look as much as possible as the old Gnome 2 and drop any animation and special effect. I installed all the Gnome shell extensions I had on Ubuntu, removed some and added others to cope with the new version of the shell. I have an almost pixel perfect copy of my Ubuntu desktop now.

I switched for similar reasons, but went from Ubuntu to Fedora a couple years ago. I like Debian as well, but its a bit slower to release at every 2 years unless you stay on testing or backports. Fedora releases are every 6 months, and the kernel seems to update faster than that. I've been using docker and toolbx for things where I need vendor tools that are somewhat distro specific. Even if you use Debian I'd recommend toolbx for developers.

It's the same. Ubuntu is based on Debian. The default GUI is different but they change that in every major release anyway.

I was wondering more about support of drivers and codecs etc. Is Debian after adding the non-free drivers exactly the same as Ubuntu or are there some things that are only specially available in Ubuntu? Especially also regarding things like audio/video codecs, hdmi etc.

I went from Ubuntu to Debian on a desktop machine. I have an nVidia 1080Ti with default drivers, running 3 displays with no problems. Motherboard audio works, USB headphones also work well. I can watch videos no problem and re-encoding/recording with ffmpeg/OBS works without a hitch. Only thing I remember doing is replacing the firefox version from ESR to latest.

10/10, would recommend over snaps.

They're allegedly including the non-free stuff automatically now, but the better solution is to avoid that hardware whenever possible. Proprietary drivers tend to have more bugs because the public can't fix them, and even if they're supported now, you're at the vendor's mercy for when it stops working regardless of what Debian or Ubuntu includes.

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