Does Vanilla Debian need tweaking to be better suited to Desktop/Laptop use?
 

Hi.

How does for example, MX differ to Vanilla Debian with regards to tweaking? Is MX much better suited for Desktop use than out-of-the-box Vanilla Debian?

'deb.png' is from about 2 minutes into video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ny6eqqKoKcI

Is out-of-the-box Debian more suited to Servers or is it agnostic regarding installing on a Desktop or Server?

Let's start with desktops. Debian has GNOME, the other has what, IceWM and Spaceman-fm?

I would prefer the latter and I'm no fan of GNOME, but you can't expect "Vanilla" Debian to have a lightweight desktop like that.

And if they did, more people would probably ask the question you're asking. Certainly one is better for a lightweight distro, but maybe you'd be better off comparing Debian without the standard desktop choice.

Also, Debian doesn't come with a GUI text editor? I figured it had GEdit or something. I mean, the guy in the video prefers nano, that doesn't mean it's the only option.

I may have missed your point, but not on purpose.

Hi freemedia2018. No, MX uses Xfce. But I was not talking about the Desktop Environments anyway. I was asking more about out-of-the-box tweaks for Desktop/Laptop use.

By tweaks do you mean nonfree firmware, etc, desktop customization, etc? If so yes AntiX, MX, Sparky linux and others are customized debian-esque distros.
You can make your own if you want using AntiX remaster stuff or Linux-Live-Kit, Refracta, Respin, may be others too.

Hi linus72. I mean customizations like those in the images in my original post.

It's fine out of the box. (I did use the multi-media repository (mvo?) as well in my sources.list, but it ended up causing more trouble than it was worth at upgrade time, so I ditched it.) Debian was my go-to standard desktop on my laptops for several years up until very recently. My uses are mainly browsing,email, & virtualisation using qemu/kvm. Just be aware I dislike Ubuntu and its variants so YMMV (handholding, hiding stuff behind the scenes, bringing in new stuff before its ready, etc).

For customisations etc LMDE is good, because its the Debian version of Mint.

It's basically Debian Stable + a heavyweight GUI, so it comes down to personal taste.

The last couple of times I installed Debian, it gave me several desktop environments to choose among and did not object to my installing two or more.

A

Although I'm not familiar with MX I've been running plain - mate desktop - debian on my desktop system for years. Ib of the greatest things about virtually any linux based distro, you can pretty much make it look how you want, customize to suite your needs. You can configure it, and be done with it... or you can spend every day tweaking it if it just makes you feel better.

If something was better... why would the bad ones be around?

I don't understand the question. Anything based upon Debian can, in theory at least, do anything Debian can and, equally, Debian could install anything from something based upon it.
If you like MX, Ubuntu, Mint... then, great, go for it! If you'd like to take more time and choose more then I would say Debian is still a good choice.
Since when has Linux been shrink-wrap OS?

Technically, I bought Red Hat in the carton 18 years ago, but my experience with the early versions of Ubuntu that came out later was better. Eventually Debian caught up to that as well.

So for a while now, but it varies.

You could call bunsenlabs a tweak in that one of its goals is to improve the look and feel. (The other goals include a lightweight environment.)

Hi 273 et al. I don't refer to any GUI tweaks but rather backend tweaks like the images in post #1.

Referring to those images, the answer is no, it works fine out of the box. If you have uncommon needs like realtime or are running something like an audio dax setup that needs near-realtime, then yes. But for normal youtube, multimedia, playing CDs, DVDs or blu-ray, then no (4k I don't know as I don't have it).

I ran Debian Stable on my desktop for a few years up until 2018. It's easy to install different desktop environments; I used XFCE.

I've not really bothered, on any distro, with 'tweaks' like you demonstrated. I've got a Skylake Core i3, plenty of RAM, and solid state storage: performance really is never an issue.

I left Debian because I found that stable is too conservative for desktop use for my liking. For that matter it can even be too conservative for a server! Software gets outdated and lacks features present in newer versions, but trying to install said newer versions is somewhat of a hassle however I do it. Meanwhile testing and sid don't really appeal. So I've switched to *bunutu LTS, despite some reservations, for what I hope is a good balance - not recklessly bleeding edge and not making me deal with major upgrades twice a year, but still staying modern enough to be relevant.