It feels like I’ve gone full cir­cle. I started, some time ago, with slack­ware, installed from a cou­ple of flop­pies. Then Red­hat, Suse, Man­drake and Ubuntu. I’m sure there were oth­ers. But in and out of the dis­tros there was always debian. I like Ubuntu but then after one par­tic­u­lar upgrade I dis­cov­ered that, overnight, the desk­top had mor­phed into some­thing grue­some. I could’ve tin­kered and regressed. Instead I moved to Linux Mint. Then to Linux Mint Debian. And the LMDE chair was very comfy.

But recently I wanted to install Linux on a cou­ple of clapped out old head­less servers. They don’t have USB ports, at least, not bootable ones. They have floppy dri­ves, and space-age CDROM dri­ves. But LMDE is only avail­able on DVDs. I’m sure there are ways of get­ting LMDE on a CDROM and doing a net­work install but I really can’t be arsed find­ing out. Why bother when I can just install debian?

So I installed Debian, and saw that it was good. Really easy. Then I installed it on another Clapped out PC, and that was easy too. Then I installed it on a lap­top, and that wasn’t quite so easy. But still easy enough to be worth the effort. It is sug­gest­ing I use some abom­i­na­tion that calls itself Gnome 3 but I found it just as happy to use Xfce4 instead. It’s now being installed on an Acer Aspire One 753, and that is not with­out its prob­lems. But not big prob­lems. And I’ll have debian. It’s like putting on a big comfy pair of slippers.