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Here's something about to roll off the submission queue. My interest in it is that I have an older Macbook where the battery doesn't hold charge well and Apple wants to charge an arm and a leg to work on it, so I figured I'd just install some linux distro on it and use it myself. I haven't played in the distro space in quite a while and I'm suffering paralysis by analysis, so recommendations/suggestions are welcome, particularly from anyone who has installed linux on a Macbook.
I find the deprecation of bash as default and which to be interesting, both things I've relied upon heavily in the past.
Debian 12 "Bookworm" Officially Released, Here's What's New - 9to5Linux:
The Debian Project released today the final version of the Debian 12 "Bookworm" operating system, a major release that brings several new features, updated components, and many improvements.
After almost two years of hard work, Debian 12 "Bookworm" is finally here and it's powered by the long-term supported Linux 6.1 LTS kernel series. This kernel brings new and updated drivers to support modern hardware and it will be officially supported until December 2026.
New features in Debian 12 "Bookworm" include a new non-free-firmware repository consisting of non-free firmware packages split from Debian's non-free repository. Those upgrading from Debian 11 to Debian 12 will have to add the new non-free-firmware repository to their sources.list files.
Debian 12 also brings read/write support for APFS (Apple File System) with the apfsprogs and apfs-dkms utilities, a new tool called ntfs2btrfs that lets you convert NTFS drives to Btrfs, a new malloc implementation called mimalloc, a new kernel SMB server called ksmbd-tools, and support for the merged-usr root file system layout.
Other new features include Secure Boot support on UEFI-capable AArch64 (ARM64) systems, a new shiny-server package for Debian Med Blend that simplifies scientific web apps using the R language, as well as GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 12.2 as default system compiler.
[...] Other noteworthy changes include the deprecation of os-prober by default in the GRUB bootloader to check for existing OS installations. This mainly affects dual-boot users, who will need to rely on dpkg-reconfigure now.
Debian Bookworm also deprecates the use of bash as /bin/sh, removes the libpam-ldap and libnss-ldap packages as they're no longer maintained upstream and replaces them with libpam-ldapd and libnss-ldapd, removes the tempfile and rename.ul programs (mktemp and file-rename can be used as a replacement), and replaces rsyslog with the systemd journalctl utility for viewing logs.
Also deprecated is the which tool. The Debian Project recommends using command -v for writing shell scripts), as well as type or type -a for interactive Bash shell users. ZSH, CSH, and TCSH users are not affected by this change.
[...] Debian 12 "Bookworm" will be supported for five years, until June 2028. Here are a few screenshots of the boot menu, lock screen, and a live session featuring the KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS desktop environment.
Also at www.debian.org
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday June 21, @10:52AM (4 children)
I am wondering about hardware support. I used to stay on stable releases (openSUSE Leap mostly) but I have switched to a rolling release (Tumbleweed) ~2 yrs ago due to the pain involved in getting recent hardware running. Are drivers backported in Debian?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Freeman on Wednesday June 21, @02:25PM (2 children)
Recent hardware: bleeding edge hardware, enthusiast hardware, or power user hardware? Most people don't even need power user levels of hardware. I've got a 6 year old computer running a ryzen 1700 that is more than plenty powerful for most tasks. In the event that you're in need of serious power and every second gained is $$ in the bank, I could see needing the latest and greatest with the most up-to-date patches / fixes / workarounds, etc. (Serious YouTuber processing videos, maybe? Other media/video editors? Big Name Studios like Bethesda/Microsoft? Maybe even small software shops that need the horse power?) Otherwise, the Long-Term-Support / Stable releases are the best way to go, due to the stability they bring. While I like having a sweet setup, most of my time is spent waiting on the server to process my request. As opposed to waiting for my browser to load.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday June 21, @02:48PM (1 child)
Talking about old hardware that's banging around, kiddo's machine is running something like an AMD Athlon X4 850. The first thing I did (when I started using it again) was replace the HDD with an SSD, which helped the machine immensely. I recently dumped my GTX 1650 into it and it's doing great for the games we play. Before that it was running a vintage fanless Radeon HD6570 GPU (which is now sitting in a box somewhere). https://www.quietpc.com/sap-hd657-ult [quietpc.com] (Pretty sure this is the exact one.) It was definitely having issues playing modern games or even older games like Terraria, without serious bits of lag. Now, it runs the likes of Planet Crafter, pretty smoothly (with the newer GPU), and the Terraria experience is definitely much better. I would have replaced the machine outright, if all it was being used for was office work. It doesn't run much snappier than a RaspberryPi 4 and the responsiveness of a Pi4 may be increased immensely when using an OS that loads into RAM (Puppy Linux / TinyCore Linux). Assuming, you have at least the 4GB, if not 8GB version. Due to the fact that you need the 4Gb/8GB version just for reasonable Web Browsing due to Browsers being memory hogs nowadays.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday June 21, @02:51PM
Next upgrade will need to be Motherboard+RAM+CPU as I also replaced the PSU with a nice PSU when I found one on sale. It's kind of the Frankenstein computer, but it gives kiddo a reasonable computer experience.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 25, @12:13AM
If you want latest, you go with Debian Sid, and update as you need.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Thursday June 22, @02:51AM
Debian replaced bash with dash for /bin/sh sym-linking since the early 2010s. What was removed now is the option to run "dpkg-reconfigure dash" and go back to bash.
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