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Switching over to Debian

June 8th, 2026 - Written by Andreas

As readers of this blog might be aware, my main computer had been running Fedora Linux for a while. Just over a week ago, I made the decision to replace this with Debian Linux. My “server” (a screenless laptop) and an old Pentium laptop (a ThinkPad Yoga 11e) were already running Debian 13 for a while, so it also just felt good to bring the remaining device in line.

I had two main reasons for wanting to switch to Debian. The first one is that the continuous stream of kernel updates in Fedora was tiring me a bit, especially as the Nvidia kernel module has to be rebuilt every time. The other one is that Debian is a proper community-driven distribution, as opposed to Fedora, which, at the end of the day, is owned by Red Hat. I really like Debian’s philosophy and it very much agrees with my convictions and ideas.

However, I also wanted to try out a more stable distro compared to Fedora (stable as in, package versions and update policy). For some applications I prefer to have the most recent version, but this is trivially easy with the likes of Flatpak. Thus, with Debian I’d get a stable base with Flatpaks for software I want on the latest version. Instinctively, this idea is very appealing to me.

Although installation was very easy, I apparently did make a mistake installing Debian from a live CD. I chose to encrypt my drive, however, this also encrypted my /boot partition. The bootloader (GRUB in this case) does not have the same computational resources compared to when the kernel is loaded, so decryption took rather long (15 to 20 seconds). I reinstalled Debian from the net-install ISO and this sorted out encryption the way I wanted it in the first place (encrypted root /, but no encrypted /boot).

Installing Nvidia drivers was easy enough too, thanks to the excellent Debian wiki on Nvidia. I had to figure out which version I exactly needed from Nvidia, but in the end, I found the drivers I wanted and so far the system has been reliable. I’ve been running CUDA workloads and been playing some games and I’ve not encountered any issue or degraded performance so far.

So far, I’ve been enjoying Debian—it’s been reliable and snappy. I like that there aren’t waiting 10 updates for me every day! I have noticed no problems in transferring my “workflow” over from Fedora, which is a good thing. Looking forward to many more boring days with Debian.