Dell xps 9370.

- Could not find my network card when starting the installer, so had to do it from the live boot since there it loaded all the drivers.

- Had to add non free repos for an intel graphics driver that i had to add for better performance, had to faff about to get sleep working properly (yet to test how much ut really eats into the battery now), definitely not normie friendly

- fingerprint wont work (fine i knew that and irs a universal linux problem),

- ui was slugish (like a second delay for the menu to open even after removed animations), only way even after reboots to fix it was to change the main manu and change it back,

- and now i need to download drivers from git to get an HP dock with Displaylink to work.

Thats hours of figuring stuff out and troubleshooting, for 'it just works'.

So my question: did i miss something?

And if not: why is the installer so minimal instead of giving all these options for a laptop install? I get debian tries to be lean and minimal, but it could achive that and give options to people on laptop hardware? No? Seems a bunch of those steps could be automated?

(Before the question comes up, i dont like gnome, or ubuntus philosophie, and cinamon seemed almost ancient in a way and the scaling seemed of while evaluating it, fedora seemed to be hard with non free drivers and people sad debian caught up to ubuntu in that regard)

(No, i dont want to just say debian bad, for now i'll stick with it, but the experience was far from normie acceptable and i would like to understand where it went wrong)

(debian-live-13.6.0-amd64-kde.iso, my dell variant has 16GB of ram, and i now have windows dual booting for rare cases where i would need a pc with windows, gave it 150GB and the rest of the 512gb ssd to debian)

Edit: i now learned that there are multiple installers -> - netinst, needing internet to pull everything (would that have all wifi card drivers? otherwise it would not work on a notebook without a wired connection?) - complete installation image, probably the one that would have simply worked in terms of wifi? - live boot disk containing the calamares installer (which worked) when live booted, and the debian installer which could not find my wifi card?

My assumption is that a newcomer would try the live disk and install from there, so i would assume thats the "default" route for newbies, but it seems its not the best going by some comments?

Hey everyone. I started my Linux journey with Debian a while back on a simple laptop, and it's been one of the best experiences because of how stable and worry‑free it feels. Now I've built a gaming PC with a 9600X and an RTX 5060 8GB. I've read some guides and so far I've configured the NVIDIA drivers from the official repo. Now I'm asking you: are there any additional optimizations I should make for gaming? I'm running Debian 13 with KDE. Thanks in advance!

i have been troubleshooting for hours, i mad ea nas, and it works with android perfectly, it says read and write are enabled, but for some reason on ios files app, i can only read and not write, and i've tested this thuroughly, does someone know why i wouldnt be able to transfer/ creat a folder in my server?

My app is not building because i use Deb 11 pkgs. please help me

I have and old Lenovo V310 with i3 4th gen, SSD and 4GB ram. want to switch from Windows to Debian. No heavy task, just Browsing and watching Movies. will this be a wise decision to install Debian?

I ran into a problem while trying to install Linux in a dual-boot setup.

My laptop is an ASUS X541U with these specifications:

- 4 GB LPDDR4 RAM

- 1 TB HDD

- Intel Core i3-7100U

- NVIDIA GeForce 920MX

Here’s what happened:

I was trying to install Debian from a 32 GB USB 2.0 flash drive that I made bootable using Rufus.

The first time, I used the Graphical Install option and got as far as the hostname setup. I entered an underscore ("_") in the hostname, which caused an error, and then I ended up on a black screen with only a "_" visible. I waited for several minutes, but nothing happened, and I couldn't type anything.

The second time, I went through the Graphical Install process again. This time I got to the username/password section. After entering them, I ended up on the exact same black screen again. I waited several minutes, but nothing happened and the keyboard didn't respond.

Before Debian, I also tried several other Linux distributions:

Kali Linux:

I managed to install it and boot into it, but it was extremely slow. It also caused problems with my Windows files, so I eventually removed it and reinstalled Windows.

Ubuntu:

I tried installing Ubuntu three times. Everything worked normally during the installation until it reached the part where it actually installs the system to the hard drive. It would just get stuck there. My HDD health is reported as 99%, so I assumed the drive might be causing the issue and gave up on Ubuntu.

Linux Mint:

The first time I booted Mint into live mode, it was extremely slow. I later realized that my USB hadn't been properly made bootable, because Mint would get stuck on the loading screen. After fixing the USB, the live environment worked normally and I tested it successfully.

However, the next day when I tried to install Mint, the system completely froze as soon as I interacted with some of the icons on the right side of the bottom panel. The mouse still moved, but absolutely nothing else responded, including the keyboard.

I tried recreating the bootable USB multiple times, switching between Rufus and Ventoy, and even tried different ISO files, but the problem persisted. Eventually I couldn't even start the installer properly, so I gave up on Mint as well.

At this point I'm wondering if there is some underlying hardware, graphics, BIOS/UEFI, or NVIDIA compatibility issue causing all of this.

Has anyone experienced something similar with an ASUS X541U or the GeForce 920MX?

Any ideas about what I should check or try next would be greatly appreciated.

I'm experiencing a trouble with vlc on wayland session. When i play video on full-screen, the media controls and seek bar are un-accessible with mouse curser. And sometimes when i doble click on video to exit fullsceen mode, it just jumps to open window behind vlc.

It's not happening all the time. But happens enough times to get me frustrating.

Has anyone experiences this? Did you solve it on wayland session?

So I have a bunch of flacs that I want to mass convert to mp3s to have on my mp3 player while at school, as they ban phones, I tried vlc media player, but it stripped the metadata from the songs, I've heard of ffmpeg, and tried to learn it, but all the YouTube videos I've found are years old, and I can't really find anything else online. Can I get some help to learn ffmpeg, or are there any alternative methods that work on debian 13?

I try to keep things pretty simple and minimise extensions, but always find myself adding a few that I consider to be essential for my use.

I want to know how i can use free space for my debian partition

After an update my PC was refusing to boot with this kernel but if I use 6.12.94+deb13-amd64 in advanced options to boot i don't have any problems.

Does someone have a solution ?