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Mohammed Ismail Ansari
Mohammed Ismail Ansari

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Why and How I migrated my ThinkPad from Arch to Debian

This article outlines my migration from Arch Linux to Debian. The details about the migration are spanned across a few videos, but below is a reasonably short summary.

This is basically a continuation

Arch gave me a fresh new direction to explore and experience Linux the way I never did before. I created a couple of reusable artifacts and it in a way became a base for my second YouTube channel.

Arch was great, but...

Things kept breaking, and I found myself spending more time on fixing things than I expected, even with my prior experience with Linux before I spent four years on macOS.

So I started looking out for alternatives and found the exact thing I was looking for.

And then I installed Debian in an uncommon way

I couldn't lose the control I had over my Linux setup back with Arch by delegating it to a graphical installer. So I installed Debian in the way we usually do install Arch.

All this learning had to be documented somewhere so I created another video talking about the process in a little bit of detail.

This moved everything, so the gaps "shifted"

Moving to Debian meant re-setting up the entire machine, even deeper than what I had to do back when I moved the factory-installed Windows to a smaller partition to make space for my primary Linux partition.

The new setup took away a few issues I never got fixed, and in exchange, brought with it a few other ones. I talked about the similarities, differences, negatives, and most importantly, the positives of the migration in a separate video, adding another episode to my series Back to Linux.

Further

As I did last time, I'll keep my eyes open for ways to improve my setup and workflow, and will keep documenting my learning to be able to share them with the rest of the community.

Needless to say, I'm loving the alternate universe with Debian. Do throw in your ideas and thoughts in the comments and hopefully, we can learn something from each other.

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