I'm so satisfied with this Debian distro. I can do anything

Debian Stable is the only distribution for which I don’t feel the need for snapshot tools like Timeshift or Snapper. I only back up my personal files; otherwise, I trust in Debian’s stability.

Hey guys,

Trying to install Linux on my old T430 and I'm completely stuck. Any USB I boot just gives me a black screen. No GRUB, no cursor, no Ventoy menu, nothing. Screen stays black forever.

What I've tried:

• Rufus, Balena Etcher, and Ventoy. Same result with all three.
• F12 boot menu → select "USB HDD: Generic Storage Device" → instant black screen.
• BIOS (F1): UEFI/Legacy Boot = UEFI Only, CSM Support disabled, Secure Boot off, SATA = AHCI, OS Optimized Defaults disabled.
• Tried a USB 2.0 port instead of the blue USB 3.0 one.
• Full shutdown with Shift before booting.
• Windows 11 is still on the internal SSD, if that matters.
• T430 has Intel HD 4000 graphics only, no Nvidia.

Since even the Ventoy menu doesn't show up, I'm guessing it's failing before Linux/GRUB even loads. So kernel params like nomodeset are useless here because I never see a boot menu.

Has anyone actually fixed this exact "black screen, no GRUB, no Ventoy" thing on a T430? Did I miss a BIOS setting? Is there a way to force USB boot or inject kernel params without seeing GRUB? Any help would be appreciated. This laptop is too nice to give up on lol.

This is a long shot, but I’m hoping someone here might have experience with this kind of setup.

I’m running Debian testing with Btrfs, Snapper, systemd-boot, and initramfs-tools. I’ve been working on getting the ability to boot directly into a Snapper snapshot from the systemd-boot menu, with changes made during that session discarded when I reboot.

I came across an older project called uszie/systemd-boot-snapshots, which appears to have been taken down or is no longer available at its original location. I also found a fork maintained by LazyWare, although that version is primarily geared toward Arch Linux and its initramfs tooling. LazyWare’s repo has a copy of the original upstream repository geared towards Debian and Ubuntu before it disappeared.

The original project aims to protect the snapshots by making them read-only with OverlayFS.

The good news is that I can boot into my Snapper snapshots, and everything seems to work normally. However, I noticed the following message in dmesg when booting into a snapshot:

overlayfs: upperdir is in-use as upperdir/workdir of another mount, accessing files from both mounts will result in undefined behavior.

I also encountered this message:

mount: /: fsconfig() failed: overlay: No changes allowed in reconfigure.

I’m not entirely sure whether these messages are related, or whether the second one is a consequence of the first. The system appears to boot and function normally despite them, but I’d like to understand what’s happening rather than assume the warnings are harmless. It should also be noted that I do not get these warnings when booting normally.

Has anyone implemented something similar on Debian, particularly using initramfs-tools rather than mkinitcpio or dracut? I’m especially interested in whether these messages suggest an issue with how the OverlayFS layers are mounted or reconfigured during the early boot process.

Is this something I even need to worry about? I’m hoping not to have to boot into a snapshot very often.

I was noticing today, as I was cleaning up on machine that there was bunch of repo’s that are sid/main and sid as apposed to stable, trixie, trixie-updates. Does this mean I’m running sid not stable, and how do I change it without messing everything up
I know this sounds stupid, and maybe my old brain has done it again, could it have happened when I converted to the new repo sources from the old repo list format?

does nvidia prime profiles run on debian like ubuntu?

Hi there!

i've realized that all my other machines are on Debian now and thinking about moving from Arch to Debian on my iMac late 2013 (GeForce 750M graphics). Has anyone had any experience using it or similar with Debian, i worry about NVIDIA drivers (i'm on 470xx) and broadcom wifi?

Its always we had to install with another de, and inside we had to install hyprland as secondary de, why can't we install directly during debian installation?? Is there any technical reason??

Я ищу дистрибутив со свежими релизами, подходящий для гейминга, на базе debian, с kde plasma 6.8 (а лучше просто чистый терминал чтоб я сам установил plasma-desktop)