I never managed to install it on the desktop though.
How do you install Debian on a desktop these days?
Usually, I downlod it, dd it onto a usb stick, boot from it and then Im stuck because it does not have my wifi drivers and I don't have a cable to connect my desktop to my router.
Debian will not ship non-free software in its main repos / official installers. The unofficial images are exactly that, created outside the rules of the project to avoid this prohibition. But, you don't have to trust them.
You can download and place the non-free firmware files on a thumbdrive yourself, and the official installer can use them. It will stop and prompt you to insert the thumb drive if it is necessary to complete the installation.
If you e.g., netinstall over a wired ethernet connection, it is rarely a problem. But, all 802.11ac and above wifi chipsets require a non-free firmware. You can always add non-free to your sources.list and install nonfree firmware after installation for any devices other than those required for installation, i.e., your network adapter (and in maybe a super rare case for a desktop install, your disk controller).
My first problem with this is the Firmware link you posted. I don't know what to download from it.
My second is that I would like to boot from an USB drive first to try Debian 11 for a while without installing it. So there is no installer asking me to insert a thumb drive. I just dd the downloaded ISO to the USB drive.
These images are only "unofficial" due to the aforementioned non-free firmware; everything else in them is the same as in official images. Debian cannot guarantee that this firmware will be supported in any real sense, being proprietary; they're simply making it available for the user's convenience.
That's pretty much the same for the desktop, except you are maybe more often in need of some non-free driver that you have to keep available at hand (eg. on another USB stick) for when the installer asks for it. I find it simpler to do the initial install with an ethernet cable, and only then install the Wi-Fi drivers (or the Nvidia proprietary driver) using the non-free repository.
After installing your desktop environment of choice (eg. KDE), the user experience is very similar to that of Ubuntu, except a bit more barebone (or more minimal, or less bloated, however you say it) and more stable (in the Debian sense of stable; eg. you get Firefox ESR instead of the latest Firefox).
I like the stability of it: there are very few updates, and even when there are, I've yet to see one that breaks something.
That being said, I wouldn't use Debian on all my desktops: having few updates is not always desirable.
If you run Debian stable (or oldstable), you only get back-ported bug fixes, and no new features-- the upstream versions of the packaged software are "frozen" before each new major Debian release.
So, you don't get a million updates caused by exactly tracking the upstream. You only get the updates necessary to address bugs.
A huge upside of this is that you don't have to worry about breaking changes until a major version upgrade. E.g., some years ago upstream TCL changed its default from blocking to non-blocking I/O. I had to change nearly every TCL script I had to account for this change after dist-upgrading to the new Debian version. It was nice to not have a breaking change like this occur with just some random automated update.
If you want Debian + rolling release, there is testing and unstable. But, packages in testing only get security patches when they trickle down-- there is no explicit security patching for testing. E.g., I wouldn't run a web browser or other security critical software from the testing release where it is exposed to the outside world. Probably safer to either run sid/unstable for a desktop, or careful use of pinning. For my own desktop, I've been running Bullseye testing, but pin Firefox back to Buster since it doesn't have any library conflicts.
Firefox and Thunderbird are handled differently. These packages track upstream ESR versions in Debian "stable", and the version can change in the course of a stable release.
Well, yes; you don't get much to update with Debian, whereas using Arch, for example, you have many updates, very often. Sometimes having many updates is what you want (therefore use Arch) sometimes it's not (therefore use Debian).
Personally, I use the non-free netinst CD. When I get to tasksel I only check "Standard system utilites". After rebooting (into a system without even X) I install, wifi and GPU drivers, microcode, "kde-plasma-desktop" and "plasma-nm". This way, I get a very minimal and lean KDE desktop, and after rebooting I install other programs as I see fit.
You can grab the unofficial images as others say. Or simpler still, just usb tether your phone to your desktop and use that internet to install any necessary wifi drivers from the non-free repositories.
I use one of these two, whichever is better for a given case:
- install it using debootstrap from some live system (https://www.system-rescue.org/, or Debian on a usb stick). Internet works in this live system, so I can install wifi firmware and other required packages
- install it into a VM (I have a VM with prepared Debian system -- e.g. with my SSH keys, with my .bashrc and .vimrc), boot live system on the target machine, rsync the prepared system there
> then Im stuck because it does not have my wifi drivers and I don't have a cable to connect my desktop to my router.
I'd assume you have more than 1 computer at home. So use a USB stick to transfer the missing files. Not convenient, but you don't install a new Debian that often.
How do you not end up with piles of ethernet cables? They seem to throw them in the box with all kinds of stuff you wouldn't expect including blu ray players.
I never managed to install it on the desktop though.
How do you install Debian on a desktop these days?
Usually, I downlod it, dd it onto a usb stick, boot from it and then Im stuck because it does not have my wifi drivers and I don't have a cable to connect my desktop to my router.