Edit: It works! Not beautiful and shows a concerning amount of “Error” lines on startup but it will do. I got VSCodium and ESP-IDF running, at least – and CMake isn’t awfully slow despite it being a crappy 4GB RAM machine (not easily upgradeable). The first boot took a while and I haven’t rebooted since, I guess it will be below 30 seconds next time (Mint on same machine but HDD was about 1 minute).

Edit: I hope I chose the right kernel here, surprisingly not much info online on this! Also, I picked “targeted” because the 10-year-old system does not use any cutting-edge hardware and all drivers should be auto-detected, I think.

After some experience with Linux Mint, I gathered the courage to try another distro. I’d like to turn an old laptop into an IPTV receiver plus FTP/OpenVPN/HomeAssistant server with occasional desktop use. I first installed Windows 11 just in case my family needs to use it (it fucking sucks, the built-in PS/2 keyboard doesn’t work half the time but that’s an issue for later) but now I’ll be turning it into a dual-boot setup with Debian as the primary option. Please give me some encouragement, I’m really afraid of new things.

Old pic: https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/d4bf0222-4fc1-42ab-a3e9-464087dec3af.png

    • ChaoticNeutralCzech@lemmy.mlOP
      2·
      2 hours ago

      See my newest comment with the monospaced text.

      But yeah, not a real issue, I fixed it in 15 minutes. Apparently it was foolish of me to want Num Lock on the lock screen (Czech keyboard layout uses the number row for diacritics).

      Edit: Now I fixed that too. I can easily use numbers in my password now!

    • NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml
      1·
      2 hours ago

      I had a fair amount of issues back in the day due to debian having limited support for newer hardware with proprietary drivers. I wouldnt be surprised if that still a thing given Debian’s modus operandi.