I recently installed Debian alongside Windows 10 to replace Lubuntu, and will be trying it out for the next month or so to see how well it fits into my use cases as a student and software developer in training.

Why Debian?

I’ve been itching to try Arch Linux, but since I’m still a relative beginner to Linux I opted for a distribution that would be easier to set up and integrate into my workflow right away. For this round I was looking for something fairly stable that I could set up quickly and customize over time.

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Debian is historically significant as one of the earliest massive (over one thousand developers) free/open source software projects. It demonstrated that not only was it possible for such large decentralized teams to self-organize and build large-scale free software projects, but that such projects could continue to grow without sacrificing code quality or project stability.

The project is still going strong, and today, a plethora of Linux distributions are based on branches of Debian, including Ubuntu and its siblings. (Image source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/DebianFamilyTree1210.svg)

Thanks to many shared elements between Debian and Ubuntu, I’ll have the benefit of an abundance of resources and help documentation to help guide me through.

I’ll post the steps I take towards building a work-ready environment, and if a fellow Linux beginner finds one or two posts to be helpful to them, I’ll count this a success!

Cheers,

Mark