Why switch?
I played with the idea of switching for quite a while. Having switched my daily driver from Windows maybe 6-9 Months ago I made many mistakes in the meantime.
Good and bad
This may have led to a diminshed experience with ubuntu but all in all, I was very pleased to see that Linux works as a daily driver. Still, I was unhappy with the kind of dumbed down gnome experience.
Problems
There were errors neither I nor people I asked could fix and the snap situation on ubuntu (just the fact that they’re proprietary, nothing else).
Installation
Installing debian (and kde) was easier and harder than I expected. The download mirror I used must not have been great although its very close to my location because it took ages although my internet connections is good.
Apps
Since I switched to Linux, I toned down my app diet a lot. Installing all my apps from ubuntu was as easy as writing a short list and going through discover. Later I added flatpak which gave me a couple apps not available through discover (such as fluffychat). The last two I copied directly as appimages.
Games
I was scared that the „old kernel“ of stable debian would be a problem. As it turns out, everthing works great so far, a lot better than on ubuntu which might or might not be my fault.
Instability
Kde does have some quirks that irritate me a bit like installing timeshift (because I tried network backups which dont work with it and the native backup solution does not seem to accept my sambashare) led to a window I could only close by rebooting.
Boot time
What does feel a bit odd is the boot process. After my bios splash, it shows „welcome to grub“ and then switches to the debian start menu for 3 seconds or so, then shows some terminal stuff and then starts kde splash and then login. This feels a lot longer than ubuntu did. Its probably easy to change in some config but its also something that should be obvious.
Summary
So far I‘m incredibly happy although I ran into initramfs already probably because of timeshift which I threw out again. I might do a manual backup if nothing else works. My games dont freeze or stutter which is nice. All apps I had on ubuntu now work on debian and no snaps at all.
TL;DR: If you feel adventurous, debian and kde are a pretty awesome mix and rid you of the proprietary ubuntu snap store. It also doesnt tell you that you can get security upgrades if you subscribe to ubuntu pro. Works the same if not better.
It’s funny because I always thought I would go full unixporn and when I finally got to Linux, I was so happy with how it looked, I never got around to looking into things like Sway properly.
Have a look at my “dreaded GNOME” Debian setup, that takes less than 30 minutes and no config file text editing and all that unixporn gymnastics.
I have the density of Full HD in 1366x768 here.
You have no idea how many times I keep coming back to this. That font is gorgeous. Truth be told, that’s a very solid set-up.
Installed and setup Debian 12 Stable as dual boot on a family desktop with i3 2nd gen, might require 4 GB more RAM. Playing Megadeth on Spotify in Firefox nicely. I replicated my theming, fonts and tweaking in more or less under 30 minutes, all with mouse clicks.
Has Windows 7 as main OS for legacy hardware, works perfectly, runs old software well.
How often are you jumping back to Windows?
I would say about 10-20%. Easier time dealing with curating and sorting archived videos and files, easier time with some software, and when I just need to use web browser without timeout errors. It is a good balance, and I believe I should not fight the tools with ideology. OSes are tools, and pick the right tool for right job at right time.
Absolutely agree with that.