Debian 11.5.0 - Summary
I'm not going to post more pictures here now, because they'd look exactly like the ones in the Kubuntu review above. And pretty soon I need to take a break and get dinner ready. So I'll just summarize for now.
I have found a couple things to quibble with, as I worked more with Debian. For one, after modifying /etc/fstab and creating mount points for my NAS shares, Dolphin was unable to access the contents of those shares. In other words, exactly like Kubuntu and various other distros. However, Dolphin was easily able to access them if I selected Network, then used its smb support to access the NAS, but not via nfs, which is my preference on Linux computers. Since I do have access to these shares via Dolphin (although not the easiest way), I have to call this a quibble, and not a showstopper.
The second quibble is that everything runs slow on my Debian VM. Noticeably so. Like, I had to close everything and reboot in order to finish building my tab stacks in Vivaldi. And while playing Spider solitaire, when I dragged a card from one pile to another, it would move across the screen in a series of jerks, and then pause for a second when I dropped the card onto the destination pile.
I couldn't figure out a reason for this slowness. Debian only loads and enables 40 unit files on startup, or half as many as Kubuntu does. And the Debian VM was created with all the same VirtualBox settings as all my others. In other words, 32 GB drive, 4 i7 cores, 4 GB of RAM, and so on. On most of the VMs that I use for exploring distros, I can sometimes forget that I'm using the VM, because applications running on a VM guest on this laptop normally run about about 90% as fast as if they were running on the host itself. But not so with Debian, and I can't figure out why.
So, despite the slowness, I installed Thunderbird (I just don't care for Kmail), created two email accounts and installed two Google calendars using Lightning, installed Vivaldi, sync'd it and created tab stacks, installed my three favorite solitaire games, and played a while on each of those, and configured system settings, Dolphin, and Konsole. Of course, I also configured the system for access to my NAS.
I gave Debian a good workout, and I liked a lot about it. Finally, my Debian adventure has come to a close. In other words, I turned the VM into a significantly slower version of my laptop. As such, I spent a couple hours on it, reading and answering email, browsing the web (including this forum), playing each of the games, and so on. I concluded that I could use Debian as a daily driver, but I'd for sure keep looking at other distros for something that's an even better fit for me. Viva Solus!
