This would be the old PC that I was planning to recycle until my son needed to get familiar with Ubuntu and I decided to give it a reprieve. He’s now evolved to Debian and, having never actually installed vanilla Debian to an Intel PC…might as well…
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First off, a much easier experience than installing to the Pine64 ARM SBC I last put Debian on. Debian 12 is actually a pretty decent distro in it’s own right. Running unmodified Gnome on it for the time being. Thing is, Debian was a choice I’d made when I knew I had minimal resources. It kinda suits that old PC. I guess I’ll keep it that way 
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Now it’s Gnome 43, it’s a fantastic distro IMO. I mean it was always a fantastic option - but it’s up to date enough now I don’t feel like I’m way in the past.
I just can’t quite figure out how to properly get the pop-tiling stuff working. I can get it working, but it doesn’t show the shortcuts in the shortcuts area.
That’s awesome your son is using it though.
He’s SSH-ing into a Raspberry Pi 4. So, since he’s working a lot from the terminal, I showed him “Steam Locomotive”
He’s well beyond my knowledge. Maybe he’s the next generation of EOS.
We need more kids getting into this. There’s a REALLY big drop of people who care about computers/FOSS/privacy/not just computing with their phone.
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I have a “distro tester” too: an old ThinkPad T530 with two SSDs, 16GB, i7-3rd Gen. About once a year I get the urge to install vanilla debian “on the metal”. Then I remember why it’s not my daily driver. By the time I’m finished tinkering with it all I’ve done is reinvent MX without conky and “MX Tools”. I’m not bashing debian 12. It’s just the wrong tool for my purposes. Gotta say though, it was very snappy & responsive on my old beater laptop!
I hear you on that. Normally, I think of Debian as, “I need a minimalist and stable install”. Still, I am impressed by how much it’s improved since my last time playing with it.
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…that being said, I think MXLinux is my favorite Debian-based distro though.
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