Debian-specific advice

Debian is a stable distro, so software versions will remain pretty much the same over the life cycle. This is good if stability (software not changing out from under you) is desired, but if you want to take advantage of new features as they are added to whatever software you’re running, it’s less beneficial. So, if you’re going to run debian as a desktop os, I would recommend switching your apt sources to point to the unstable branch: sid switching your apt sources to point to testing (see below).

You’ll probably see a lot of older tutorials and stackoverflow posts that use apt-get, which predates apt, instead of apt as the package manager. apt is the recommended frontend; apt-get will work, but apt will have a nicer user experience.

Also, on the topic of apt, there are three ways to run updates that you’ll probably see online; this stackexchange post provides a pretty good explanation of the differences between them.

General linux advice that I think is worth sharing

Man pages are pretty helpful once you know how to navigate them. Some tips regarding that:

• You mentioned that you tried manjaro, so I think you probably already know what man is, but just in case: man is the command that you use to pull up manual pages for basically everything.
• You can search through the man database for a keyword with the apropos or man -k commands. For example, apropos video pulls up a list of all the man pages that have the word video in their names or descriptions.
• You might notice when running the above command that there are numbers in parentheses after the manual names. This is because the manuals are broken out into 9 sections based on the types of pages they contain. You can put the section number before the name to specify which section to pull up the manual from. So, if you had two manuals named foo in sections 1 and 3, to pull up the one for section 3 you would use the command: man 3 foo. If you want to read more, man has it’s own manual page, which you can pull up with man man.
• You can search for text in man with / and ?. / performs a forward search and ? performs a backwards search. You can jump forward to the next result in the search with n or back to the previous result with p.
• The bottom of man pages will have a ‘see also’ section, which lists related commands. Some man pages will also have an examples section.

Another good place to look for documentation is the arch wiki. A lot of the information on there translates to other distros fairly well, and it’s got huge amounts of well written information. If you use duckduckgo, the bang for it is !aw.

The shell is pretty intimidating for a lot of new users. While it’s not strictly necessary for most things, I do think that you’ll have a smoother linux experience if you become at least a little bit comfortable using it. Here is a bash guide aimed at beginners.

Finishing Thoughts

Looking back at what I’ve written, I realize that I have dumped a lot of information on you. So I think the best piece of advice that I can offer is this: Becoming comfortable with linux (or any new operating system) takes time and can feel overwhelming. Don’t feel pressured to understand everything immediately and don’t be afraid to go slow; Rome wasn’t built in a day.

I’ve been running linux as a daily driver for 6 or 7 years now, and I run debian on my servers, so if you have any questions now or in the future, I am happy to try to answer them.

So Debian (broadly) has three main versions. Stable, Testing, and Unstable (sid). Since you are waiting for a stable release, I’m assuming that’s where you’ll stay.

The one thing to know is that you are entering a very different kind of Linux environment than Mint and Manjaro. When Debian means stable, they mean it. It is rock steady…but it also means you’ll be outdated when it comes to features. The only updates you will get are going to be stability and security based. And that’s for the life of that OS version. So if you desperately need to update something for a new feature, you’ll need to learn backports.

Honestly, I love it (apart from on my gaming rig). It’s the OS I install on people’s machines that just want a no fuss, easy to use OS, that won’t crash or glitch out.

Well, I know it’s not answering your question but what brought you back to windows before? That’s probably more important than debians quirks.

• Install plymouth and plymouth-themes to get a graphical boot. Read the wiki here.
• Add your user to the sudo group for sudo to work.
• If you use the su command, you will need to use su - to get access to /sbin/ apps in your path.
• fonts-ibm-plex in contrib will make your user interface look better, no matter which desktop environment or window manager you use.
• The stable verbage with Debian applies to the version number of applications not changing between major releases, not the quality of the program you are running. Newly discovered security patches within applications are backported by an experienced team of volunteers, but the major version number of that app will likely stay the same. If you need a newer version of an application for new features, but want the rest of the system to stay on stable, it’s probably best to install a Flatpak.

Since you’re migrating from Windows you’ll likely want to easily transfer data between Debian and Windows.

If you install both on the same machine, with dual boot, see the NTFS page to transfer files from Windows drives. If you use a separate machine, the easiest IMHO is using a Network Share to access Windows files.

If you intend to keep using both for a while, look into a sync solution rather than migration. See syncthing for instance.

This should help get started with the migration, access your documents. If you already use Firefox/Chrome, it should be possible to install the same browser and export+import profile/settings.

If you’re looking for specific software on Debian or have issues, ask about it to get more specific comments.

Coming from Windows, I’m surprised you didn’t stick with Mint. If you want Debian, there’s a version of Mint that is Debian-based instead of being based on Ubuntu. Using that might save you a lot of grief trying to set everything up yourself.

I’ve been using Debian for probably a decade and set up a couple new installs of bookworm this week. In no particular order, here are a few things you might want to know:

• I find aptitude a lot easier to wrangle than stock apt or the GUI package managers (they’re all front-ends to the same thing). It’s got interactive queries.
• I never bother with anything other than the netinstall ISO, since nowadays downloading the packages during install is faster (and much more likely to be up-to-date) than reading them from disk. I believe the live CDs have a flashy new guided installer though, which I haven’t tried.
• Debian’s default graphical environment is GNOME, and if you’re coming from Windows there are several options that might be more familiar. I use Cinnamon, lots of people swear by KDE and XFCE, but there are a million Windows-like environments to choose from. That said, if you’re sick of Windows, try GNOME :).
• Others have mentioned that the trade-off of stability is that some software can be outdated. My preferred solution (which is not the only possibility) is to keep both stable and testing in /etc/apt/sources.list. Note that by default this will cause you to just pull everything in from testing; this post details how to prevent this if desired.
• Debian 12 has disabled os-prober by default. This means that if you’re dual-booting Windows you’ll need to edit /etc/default/grub (the comments explain what to do) and run update-grub as root. I also usually end up fiddling with the graphics options to make sure the virtual TTYs (the consoles you access with Ctrl-Alt-F<n>) have the appropriate resolution.
• Debian 12 has moved non-free firmware into its own distribution. This shouldn’t be an issue for a clean install, but if you end up with a non-working wifi card or something, check /etc/apt/sources.list for non-free-firmware and make sure you have the appropriate package installed (search ~snon-free-firmware in aptitude).
• Some packages will have interactive setup programs that you can re-run with dpkg-reconfigure $package. I most often use this with console-setup and keyboard-configuration, the former for TTY font size and the latter for swapping Caps Lock with Ctrl/Esc.

Lastly, the Arch wiki is a great resource even though Arch and Debian aren’t directly related.