Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 59000 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.
Anything I should look out for, or smooth sailing?
I am using Cinnamon + X11 + Nvidia, everything working as it should. I use Distrobox and Flatpaks for additional packages, so I don't really touch the base install much but it seems rock solid as expected from Debian.
Previous release had PHP 7.4, new one has 8.2. Nextcloud 24 supports 7.2 - 8.0, 25 supports 7.2 - 8.1 and 26 supports 8.0 - 8.2, which is a bit inconvenient.
To upgrade, I first¹ upgraded Nextcloud to 25, then PHP to 8.2, removed the versioncheck in Nextcloud to accept PHP 8.2 and then upgraded to Nextcloud 26.
Otherwise very smooth - even the usrmerge was absolutely event-free.
¹) of course what I actually did first was upgrade Debian/PHP without checking beforehand and then installing PHP 7.4 from the previous release again.
Getting sound to work (pipewire) was very unclear. I had to install a bunch of packages, run a lof of systemctl commands. Eventually I got it to work, but it wasn't just install-and-go.
Upgraded two servers and my main machine. Really nice to be on the new system.
Unfortunately disaster in that Kdiff3 crashes when you try and paste new text over previous text. You can use it once, then you have to restart it to use it a second time. Everything else appears to be a better solution.
I did the upgrade procedure to move from 11 to 12. Most things went just fine, but for some reason hplip was uninstalled and I could not print. Manually installing the correct hplip package allowed me to reconfig my printer and that was working again. The other thing that broke is my sound. The sound server changed from Pulse Audio to Pipe Wire. The sound worked with Pipe Wire but it was putting my sound card to sleep. On my motherboard, it must engage some kind of high impedance state because it causes a loud 60HZ hum. The solution was to turn off the feature that sleeps the sound card. It's a desktop system, not a laptop, so I don't care about saving battery. The config was actually in the /etc/wireplumber/main.lua.d set of configs. Besides all that, Debian 12 is great, as it has been since I started using it in 1997.
Have had it on my laptops since package freeze. No problems to report. Will switch my desktop and work PC (from Ubuntu) when I can be bothered.
For my main desktop and my multimedia PC, nothing to report really. It just works really well. Running GNOME, one PC has an AMD GPU and the other an Intel one. Both with great without slowdowns or hanging, fluid all the time.
Granted I use linux-image-rt-amd64 on the multimedia PC and my custom kernel, built from upstream source on my main desktop.
Ah, using X11 too. Wayland still doesn't play well with a lot of software that I use, OBS and FlightGear for example.